Can I tell you a secret? I have a love-hate relationship with the summer on a school campus.

As a school administrator, my days extend quite far into the summer. That’s okay – I knew what I was signing up for. Yet, it’s such a weird experience on a campus. On the one hand, it’s lighter and quiet. There is time to think, plan, and recuperate. On the other hand, it’s eerily quiet and lonely. It’s so strange to go from 100 mph to residential speeds in a few days. Mostly, I greatly miss our staff and students. That being said, I have greatly come to appreciate the time to slow down, think, and plan for the future.

As a part of the planning process for next year, our team is making some big pushes toward increasing the amount and quality of professional development on our campus. We will be making a huge push with amplifying our PLC’s and pushing writing across the curriculum. In addition to this, we will have a variety of staff meetings, optional PD’s, and district PD’s in which our staff can participate. To help organize all of this information, I developed a simple “Professional Development Calendar” with all of the trainings, dates, locations, and links to upcoming PD to keep our staff informed.

Here’s a quick example of what it looks like:

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As you can see, the calendar is broken into four sections:

• Staff Meetings – Monthly staff meeting with a specific sitewide focus. This year, it will be on “Amplifying our PLC’s”
• Academics – PD specifically aimed towards improving our academics. This year, we will be offering writing PD’s, continuing our learning walks, and a Rookie Rap for new teachers.
• Student Well-Being – Any PD for our SEL & PBIS goals to support teachers as they navigate the ever-changing behaviors of our students.
• District PD – Any PD being offered by the district office.

If for some reason one of my amazing teachers is reading this PD, I know that none of this is new information but please note these dates are all simply examples and may not be accurate. Your “legit” version is coming soon!

As with anything, I always want to make sure the “why” is understood when developing, creating, or implementing something new. While this PD calendar has a low impact on staff, the “why” is quite simple but still important. Clear, accurate, and timely communication is always appreciated by school staff. We have a lot of amazing opportunities happening on our campus. It’s important that our staff can easily access these trainings and plan for their year.

Finally, as a leader, the goals for the year must be communicated to your staff. As simple as this calendar might be, it is another way to remind our staff of our sitewide goals for the year. After all, how effective are your professional development and goals if it is unknown by your staff? Simply sharing this calendar is another way to increase the awareness of our goals for the year through visually seeing the professional development that is offered to support it.

How does your school share their important events and/or dates with staff? I would love to hear about it, so share in the comments below!

Hello friends! I know – it has been a while…but that’s life.

I am so excited to share a great tool with you today that will make your teaching easier and more enjoyable while increasing the rigor in your classroom. It’s called Brisk for Teaching, and it’s an AI-powered platform that helps you create and deliver amazing and effective learning experiences for your students.

Brisk for Teaching is a Google Chrome add-on web-based tool that helps you create lessons and quizzes, deliver personalized feedback, and detect authenticity using AI. With Brisk, you can:

• Generate and customize content that matches your curriculum, standards, and objectives
• Create multiple choice, short response, and long response quizzes and assessments
• Provide instant and personalized feedback and guidance to your students based on their performance and progress
• Analyze and visualize your students’ data and insights to track their learning outcomes and identify their strengths and weaknesses
• Create questions based on the different levels of DOK

Brisk for Teaching is super easy to use and works with any device and browser. You can also integrate it with your existing tools and platforms, such as Google Docs, Google Forms, and more.

To show you how you can use Brisk for Teaching in your classroom, I have made a video that walks you through the main features and functions of the tool. You can watch the video below or click on this link to view it on YouTube:

Thank you for reading and watching. Happy teaching!

Once we established our positive behavior expectations, our PBIS team’s next big goal was to create a sitewide behavior intervention flowchart. In this flowchart, the goal was to:

• Clearly define the difference between minor and major behaviors
• Outline a process for minor and major behaviors
• Create consistency across the entire school

We found a TON of great resources online that guided our conversation. We started by looking at a variety of flowcharts to see what would best fit our needs. Once we found the style that we liked the best, we created a template and began adding in our own information. Here is what we created:

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As you can see, the behaviors were added to the center and differentiated by minors and majors. By aligning them side by side, it helped teachers to understand the difference between a minor and major behavior in each category (ex: disruption, defiance, etc.). On each side of the behaviors, there are the interventions that are put into place for students when a minor and/or major behavior occurs. Minor behaviors can escalate to major behaviors if repeated, sustained, and/or the minor interventions have already been implemented.

Here are some best practices we had for implementing this flowchart:

Run it By Leadership

Once this was created, we took it to our leadership team for feedback. This is SO important! Don’t forget to run big decisions like this by your leadership team and staff.

Align with your Referral System

Currently, we use a combination of PBIS Rewards and Infinite Campus for logging behavior incidents on campus. In PBIS Rewards, teachers log any minor and major behaviors. The minor behaviors stay in PBIS Rewards but we move over the major behaviors to Infinite Campus so that future schools can also see these behaviors.

In PBIS Rewards, we aligned the categories (ex: disruption, defiance, etc.) to the system as the “problem behavior”. In addition to this, we aligned all of the interventions (on the far left and right side) to the “redirections” section. By doing this, it created consistency across referrals and further implemented the flowchart.

Train Your Staff

Implementing a sitewide, behavior intervention flowchart was a huge change! It was something that our teachers asked for to create consistency but there was a lot of training that was needed up front. First, we trained teachers on the flowchart and what each step meant. Afterwards, we trained them on PBIS Rewards and how to use the program to log and track the behavior information.

Shift from Discipline to Interventions

One of the biggest shifts for our staff was the difference between “interventions” and “discipline”. The left side (the minors) are interventions. They are strategies that are done in the classroom to intervene and prevent future behaviors. It is an opportunity to reteach and help students grow. The right side (the majors) are considered discipline. Discipline is something that is done by administration (ex: class suspension, referral) in response to repeated, sustained, or severe behavior incidents. There are still interventions that are done by administration (ex: Check In/Out, Behavior PTC’s, BIP’s, etc.) However, we wanted to shift the mindset from “progressive discipline” to “progressive interventions”. It was a big shift and we are still growing in this area.

Currently, we are one quarter in to fully implementing PBIS. It is WAY more than I anticipated and I know that this is going to be a several year journey. If you have any PBIS stories or best practices to share, please do so in the comments below!

As you may have been reading from my previous posts, our site has been on a journey to improve student behavior through a tiered and systematic approach. Specifically, we have begun implementing a variety of Tier 1 strategies from the PBIS model. During our first year, our goal has been to:

1. Create a positive reward program
2. Create sitewide positive behavior expectations
3. Create a sitewide behavior intervention flowchart

These are three big goals…but we are hoping that they will also bring big changes!

One of the most important parts of implementing a Tier 1 PBIS program is creating sitewide positive behavior expectations. These expectations should become the language of your site when talking about appropriate behaviors on campus. For instance, instead of creating a list of things that students shouldn’t do, these expectations focus on what students should do. In addition to this, the behavior expectations should be location specific. Expectations should be created for all areas on campus, such as the classroom, gym, cafeteria, office, etc. Here is a quick example of our behavior expectations for our classroom and cafeteria:

To get started on developing your sitewide positive behavior expectations, here are my Top 5 Tips:

#1: Develop with Your PBIS Team

First and foremost, you must have a PBIS team that can help you develop these behavior expectations. These people will help drive the conversation and help you develop these expectations. You truly cannot be an island in this process – you need the input!

#2: Create Your Acronym

Create an acronym that will become the motto of your site. As you can tell, ours is RISE which is Responsibility, Integrity, Service, and Excellence. Our behavior expectations are completely based on these four words and it is the foundation for our positive behavior program, too.

#3: Determine Your Locations & Get Input

Our PBIS Team determined that we had 10 places on campus that would benefit from behavior expectations:

• Classroom, Library, Cafeteria, Quad, Locker Room, Office, Hallway, Bathrooms, Technology, and Wellness Center

Since these are such diverse areas, we also created a Google Form where we sought input from employees that worked in these specific areas. After all, they understand the expectations far more than anyone else!

#4: Create Your Expectations

Once you have created your acronym and determined your locations, I highly suggest creating a Google Slide or Doc to brainstorm the behavior expectations with your PBIS Team. I believe it took us about 2-3 meetings about 1-2 hours each to develop all of these expectations. Honestly, it was tough at first but then we started to fall into a pattern and it went much quicker.

Again, these expectations should be focused on what students should do, rather than what students shouldn’t do. Also, try to keep them short and sweet. No more than three expectations per category and keep the sentence short.

#5: Take to Your Leadership Team & PLC’s for Revisions & Input

One of the most important parts of implementing positive behavior expectations is receiving input from your leadership team and staff. Once we developed these expectations, we took them to our leadership team for input and they took it to their teams for further input. We received some great ideas from these teams and made adjustments accordingly.

#6: Create Your Posters!

Here’s the fun part…design your poster! I know that people just love a matrix or rubric…but that is SO hard for kids to read! Try to create something that is eye-catching and easy to read. If you are struggling with this, you can make a copy of ours by clicking on this link:

Copy of RISE Behavior Expectations

If there is any final advice I would give, it would be to take your time and get plenty of input. I was highly encouraged to do this by leaders that I greatly admire and it was some of the greatest advice I ever received. While it is important to create a quality program, it is crucial to get input to create buy-in with staff.

Has your site created positive behavior expectations? If so, share in the comments below!

Last month, I shared the start of our PBIS journey in hopes of improving student behavior through a tiered system of support. Over the last quarter, we have been piloting our PBIS program to determine if this is something that we want to implement in the following school year. As I mentioned in my last post, I was apprehensive about implementing PBIS in our school. However, our pilot has been so successful that I have become a believer that these systems (when implemented strategically and effectively) can make a huge impact on student behaviors and, ultimately, student learning.

Below, I will be sharing our first steps – the foundation – of our PBIS program. Specifically, the focus will be on Tier 1 of our PBIS program because this is the area where we were lacking the most support. So…here we go!

Step #1: Forming Our PBIS Teams

Implementing a PBIS program is a huge undertaking. To get started, it was critical that we pick the right people to be a part of these teams. Our teams are broken up into two groups: PBIS Core Team and the PBIS Team.

Our PBIS Core Team is a smaller group of educators. The Core Team is responsible for the guidance of the implementation of the PBIS strategies. This team regularly meets to evaluate the BOQ (more on that below) and determine the direction of the larger team. The Core Team consists of the following people:

• Vice Principal
• School Counselor
• SEL Intervention Teacher
• iMTSS District Coordinator
• District iMTSS Psychologist

Our PBIS Team (AKA, our RISE Team) is a larger group of educators that helps with developing the ideas, creating structures, and the implementing of PBIS strategies. The PBIS Team consists of the following people:

• Everyone from the Core Team
• All Admin from the Site
• 5 Teachers (Different subjects/grades)
• Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA)

We have been incredibly fortunate to have an amazing group of educators on this team. I am constantly amazed by the ideas that come from this group as we develop our PBIS program. Without the right people in place, I do not believe we would be making the progress we are currently on our campus.

While our PBIS teams our developing this program, everything that we do is taken to our Site Leadership Team (AKA, Think Tank) for input. These are the leaders on our campus, therefore, their input, insight, and approval is of the utmost importance. After this, Think Tank takes this information to their departments (AKA, PLC’s) for more input. Finally, the PBIS team gathers all of the input to add to the PBIS program.

Step #2: Reading the Book

Over the years, I have started to become a bit skeptical about educational books. I have found that they are often written from a place of theory, rather than real-life application. A lot of time I read these books and think, “When was the last time this person was in a classroom or on a school campus?”

This is not how I feel about the PBIS Handbooks – which is AMAZING!

Our focus this year is through implementing Tier One supports at our school, so our team has only dived into the Tier 1 Handbook. However, there is SO much in here that it will probably take us a year to properly implement all the ideas and strategies. The book is practical, clear, and gives teams an easy guide on how to get started. If you are planning on implementing a tiered PBIS system in your school, I highly recommend these books.

       

The Benchmark of Quality (BOQ) helps PBIS teams examine their Tier 1 implementation by identifying current strengths and weaknesses. In addition to this, it also provides guidance and support for creating better PBIS systems within a school. The BOQ is embedded within the PBIS Tier One Handbook, however, you can find it for free on their website: PBIS Champion Model System.

Since I am a spreadsheet person, I took the BOQ from their website and turned it into a spreadsheet that automatically tabulates a school’s total score. In addition to this, I created a section where teams can add ideas and next steps during the planning process. If you would like a copy of this, click on the Google Sheet icon to the right or this link: Tier 1 – PBIS Assessment & Next Steps.

When we went through the BOQ, I was amazed at how much we have not done. While this may seem discouraging, I found it exciting. There were so many ideas, strategies, and structures that could be put into place to support students. Even if we scored low, we could easily see our next steps. At the end of scoring our BOQ, we picked the top 3 areas of growth. From there, we analyzed what we were doing, what could be improved, and piloted some of these strategies during the 4th quarter. Now, we have a very clear plan and vision for sitewide implementation during the next school year.

Right now, I am so excited for the next school year and to see how we continue to develop our PBIS program. If you have done this at your school site, please share in the comments below any tips, tricks, or strategies!

Back in December, I experienced one of the most struggling and discouraging moments in my educational career. It wasn’t one particular thing that happened that caused this moment. It was a million little things that led to a feeling of discouragement and a moment where I truly questioned whether or not I was in the right profession.

As we began the transition back from distance learning, I had this false hope that everyone would be so happy and grateful to be back on campus that student behaviors would be minimal and our greatest area of concern would be the loss of learning from the 18 months of quarantine. I was so wrong. Yes, the loss of learning was (and is still) a huge concern for anyone in education. However, I did not anticipate the amount of social, emotional, behavioral, and mental concerns our students had and would continue to experience due to the pandemic.

In my role as Vice Principal of discipline, my area of focus is on student behavior. Yes, that often means progressive discipline in the form of detentions, suspensions, et cetera. However, I also spend a lot of time trying to help students understand what they did and how to make better choices in the future. To help with this, our site has implemented a variety of strategies, such as suspension alternative programs, SEL classes and programs, behavior intervention plans, lunchtime support programs, counseling, and so much more. Despite this, I found myself feeling like all these programs and strategies were not enough. Our students were still struggling. I felt discouraged. I truly felt like nothing we did mattered because we were already doing everything we could. As a site, we had a very structured, specific, targeted, and tiered support system for students when they got in trouble. What else could we do, right?

The feeling of discouragement lasted for nearly a month. Then, one night, as I was getting ready for bed, I spent some time asking myself…Well, what haven’t we done? If I slow down and stop thinking about what we have done and started asking what we haven’t done…would there be something there for us to explore?

It was in this moment of reflection that I realized exactly what we weren’t doing. Everything that we were doing was reactive. We were responding to the behaviors after they occurred. While we had all these great programs to respond to behavior concerns, we were doing very little to prevent behavior concerns, especially on a sitewide level.

So, I started researching proactive approaches to behavioral intervention for students and the #1 word that kept popping up in my search was…PBIS. To be honest, I felt completely uninterested in this idea. In secondary education, I feel that there is a negative connotation associated with PBIS. Personally, I felt like PBIS was a thing that schools do to bribe kids to behave better. I felt it was grounded in nothing of substance – just simple bribery. However, I challenged myself to explore the idea since it seemed to be the most common system I continued to run across in my research.

During this research, I came across a book by Jessica Hannigan and Linda Hauser called, The PBIS Tier One Handbook (Amazon). I have no idea why this book grabbed my interest. I am sure it was partially due to the nearly 5-star ratings that it had on Amazon. I think the word “handbook” grabbed my interest because it sounded like it could have a practical implementation plan. Anyways, I immediately bought the book and began reading it that night.

And guess what? I was absolutely hooked. I read 25% of the book that night. Granted – there are a lot of pictures and graphs in this book…but it was so good! Many times, educational books are grounded in theory and not practical applications. That’s all well and good until the rubber meets the road and you quickly realize that the author clearly has no idea how schools actually operate. This is not how I felt with the PBIS Handbook. I felt like it was grounded in real-life applications that modeled effective leadership for a successful implementation of a school-wide PBIS program. In addition to this, it contained a Benchmark of Quality (BOQ) that allowed PBIS teams to evaluate where their site currently is, where they need to go, and numerous ideas and strategies to help thjem team get there. More importantly, it was not a system simply about “bribing” students as I incorrectly assumed. Instead, it was a systematic approach to implementing schoolwide structures (ex: clear discipline procedures, positive behavior reward system, schoolwide behavior expectations, etc.) that would have an impact on all students and staff.

Friends – there are so many more positive things that I could say about this book but…that is a story for many future posts. Today, I really wanted to give you the “why” behind the start of this journey, plus a little taste of how we got started. I am so excited for our students, teachers, and staff as we begin this journey. I have an amazing team of educators that are helping us to develop our PBIS program because there is no way that these systems can effectively be implemented on the shoulder’s of one person. I am so excited (but a little nervous) and hope that PBIS will be effective and make a positive change for our students. After all, there is only so much academic progress we can make if we do not first attend to the social and emotional needs of our students.

Over the next few months, I will have several blog posts focusing on the implementation of our Tier 1 PBIS program and I hope you choose to follow (and join) us on this journey!

To explore all of the books in the PBIS Handbook series, here are the links to their pages on Amazon: Tier 1 Handbook, Tier 2 Handbook, and Tier 3 Handbook.

Hello Friends!

Yep – I am still here. I know, it has been a while. In fact, my last post was nearly 5 months ago which is the longest I have gone without writing a post since I started this blog back in 2016. For several years, I wrote a post every single week but over the last year or two, my posts have certainly dwindled down to a couple of times a month, to once a month, and then the long hiatus that I previously mentioned.

I love this blog. Not writing on this blog for five months disappoints me. I feel disappointed in myself. Yet, the last couple of years has been…well, a lot. I have found myself in the worst state of writer’s block that I have ever had in my life. I am hoping that I can overcome this writer’s block and that I can commit two a couple of posts a month again.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a bit about the last couple of years and why this writer’s block has found its way into my life. If you have followed my blog for a while, you know that I am transparent to a fault. Why? Because I think that it is helpful to hear other’s struggles in education and, well, in life in general.

Writer’s Block Cause #1: My Personal Life

Before I dive too deep into this one, I am hesitant to even share my trivial struggles. There are people that have been through SO much more than I have in the last couple of years. Regardless, it is still my story and it had a huge effect on me. So, I feel it is worth sharing.

Our family has been through a lot of changes in the last couple of years. I was pregnant during the pandemic and had our son last summer. My pregnancies have always been difficult (ex: hyperemesis gravidarum) and adding a pandemic into it caused more worry than I realized. After our son was born, I had some complications and had to go through surgery. My daughter had a Lupus scare (she’s okay) but we spent months waiting to hear if she had Lupus or if it was an extreme allergy. Thankfully, it was the latter. Our son had surgery last month. Our family has been to the ER 6 times in the last year, urgent care more times than I can count, and countless doctor’s appointments. Crazy thing? All of this was just last year. Go back one more year and I have some stories about throwing out my back, another minor surgery, some possible heart concerns, and a variety of other medical-related issues.

In the end, everything has been fine…but it was a lot. I don’t say this for sympathy – just a life update to explain one part of my writer’s block.

Writer’s Block Cause #2: The Year(s) of COVID

Do I even need to go into this one? Everyone has live this time in different ways. My feelings during this time have been a roller coaster. It was exhausting – both personally and professionally. Personally, I often did not know what the right decisions were for my family, especially during my pregnancy. I wanted to do right by my family but that often had its own set of repercussions and heartbreaks. Some of these stories are too hard to share because they hurt just too much.

Professionally, it was exhausting in an entirely different way. Everything changed constantly in education. The rules, the mandates…it often felt like they changed weekly and we couldn’t keep up. Everyone was upset and it often felt like we couldn’t make anyone happy. Once students returned, it was clear that the struggles had just begun and there were so many ways our students needed support beyond academics, such as socially, emotionally, and mentally.

Trying to find ways to write during so much heartbreak and discouraging times just felt…well, impossible.

Writer’s Block Cause #3: Re-Finding My Passion

Finally, I have spent a lot of time trying to rediscover my passion and what makes me excited about education. As a teacher, my passion was instructional strategies and educational technology. Don’t get me wrong, I am still passionate about those things. However, as an administrator, I am starting to find new passions or, at least, slightly different versions of the passions that I previously had.

For instance, several of my future blog posts will be centering around the development of our PBIS program and trying to create a strong, tier 1 support system for behavior intervention. As a teacher, this would never have been a passion of mine. I did not have many behavior concerns in my classroom. As an administrator during COVID, I have found that this has become a passion of mine because it is a huge area of need. I truly believe that there is only so much movement we can make in education if we cannot make strong, positive strides towards behavior intervention in schools.

While this is only one example, it definitely inspired me to start looking at this blog through a different lens. It also encouraged me to tell myself that it is okay for this blog to take some new directions.

Phew – I feel like I just threw a lot at my readers! Again, I don’t share these stories for sympathy. I don’t share these stories for pity.

I share these stories to help others know that they are not alone.

If you have felt discouraged or heartbroken in the last year – you are not alone.

If you have felt stuck in the last year – you are not alone.

If you have felt exhausted – you are not alone.

We have all had big feelings in the last year…but it’s okay. You are not alone. We are in this together.

Thank you for listening to my story and stay tuned for some new posts in the next month!

Last month, I wrote a blog post on my favorite game-based learning platforms which inspired me to create a PD presentation for a conference within my district. When I was asked to present at this conference, I figured that many educators may be overwhelmed with SO many things right now that I wanted to create something easy, fun, and enjoyable for my attendees. While it may not be the deepest or pedagogically based presentation, it was fun and introduced educators to new tools that they could use in the classroom to introduce and review academic content.

The presentation is broken into three sections:

• The Pedagogy
  • While these tools are fun to use, it is always important to start out with the “why”. Why are these tools beneficial and how do they support students?
• The Tools
  • A quick list of my favorite game-based learning tools.
• The Tutorials
  • These slides are built for educators to view during AND after the presentation. While I was presenting these slides, I introduced the tools and started games for attendees to experience.

If you are looking to introduce educators at your site and/or district to game-based learning, here is a free presentation for you to use! Feel free to use, edit, and modify in whatever way will most support your educators.

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Happy November! It is hard to believe that we are almost through the first semester of school! I hope you are doing well and surviving these crazy times – because it really is SO crazy right now.

In fun news, I am starting a new series of blog posts that will come out at the beginning of each month – the Rundown! This is a simple post with a TON of links to Google Workspace Updates, helpful videos, blog posts, and a variety of instructional and educational resources that I have discovered over the last month. It is a short post this month but I plan on growing it over the next few months to contain more categories, blog posts, videos, and resources.

I hope that you enjoy these easy, quick blog posts and find something useful to use in your classroom and/or school!

Google Workspace Updates:

• Replacing a Background in Google Meet
• Slideshow Button in Google Slides
• Making Google Classroom Video Meetings Easier and More Secure
• Google Classroom Unenrollment Features
• Create Meeting Notes in Google Calendar
• Easily Add to Google Docs with the @ Menu
• Page Break Before Paragraphs in Google Docs
• New Google Meet Host Features for Audio and Video

Instructional & Educational Technology:

• PearDeck: Reflect & Review
• 11 Things Coaches Should Look For in Classroom Observations
• Slides Mania Cardtegories!
• Top 5 Game-Based Learning Platforms

Inspirational:

• Don’t Let the Tough Things Keep You from the GREAT Things! (Video)

Going forward, I hope to add many more links and sections to this blog posts. Particularly, I would like to share some leadership blog posts and videos to help support education leaders and, selfishly, help me to grow, too!

Stay tuned for the next rundown!

Hey EDU Friends!

I hope all is going well with you in your education world. I have definitely been behind on my posts because…Well, to be honest, the world of education is a bit discouraging at the moment and it can be hard to find the motivation in times like these. I figured a lot of other educators are probably feeling the same way, so I wanted to bring a super fun and easy post for all of you on game-based learning websites.

Enjoy!

#1: Kahoot

Kahoot! is a “game-based learning platform that brings engagement and fun to 1+ billion players every year at school, at work, and at home.” It’s probably the most well-known platform for game-based learning. Personally, I started with Kahoot and really enjoyed the ease of creating and delivering games to students. If you are looking for a game-based learning platform to start with, I highly suggest Kahoot as the interface is very easy to operate for all users.

Check out this playlist of videos on how to create and play a Kahoot, plus much more!

#2: Gimkit

Gimkit is very similar to Kahoot in that it is a game-based learning platform where students join, answer questions, and compete against each other. An added feature, however, is that students earn money for the questions they get correct and can use the points to purchase powerups to create engaging gameplay. In addition to this, there are several other game modes, such as Team Mode, Trust No One, and The Floor is Lava. These game modes add more variety to the gameplay – way beyond the traditional gameplay of who can answer the question correctly the fastest!

Check out this video tutorial for more information:

#3: Blooket

Recently, I was introduced to Blooket at a training on EduProtocols and I absolutely love this new game-based learning platform! It is a super fun and competitive way for students to practice and learn content. Instead of simply answering questions individually, students are challenged to answer them correctly AND as quickly as possible against another opponent. To make it even harder, the student has only a limited number of lives before they are out of the competition and simply answering questions for practice.

Here is a quick tutorial to get you started:

#4: Quizizz

Quizizz has always been one of my personal favorites. After I was introduced to Quizizz, I almost never went back to Kahoot. Personally, I really liked the format for creating quizzes and the ability to let students move at their own pace and/or complete it on their own time.

Here is a tutorial to get you started:

#5: Quizlet

Finally, Quizlet is a super simple tool to help students study, learn, and practice new material. Teachers can create flashcards, games, and much more from their features. Most of Quizlet is at your own pace, however, there is the Quizlet live feature which allows students to participate in a live game, much like the other websites above.

Here is a tutorial to get you started:

Did I miss any of your favorite game-based learning websites? Share in the comments below!