Category Archives: News

Get your students thinking with Socrative!

socrative logoNeed to engage your students during lectures? Like having instantaneous feedback on student learning? Trying to find a way to incorporate technology or to complete with student’s PED’s? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you have to check out Socrative!socrative landing page

Socrative is an app available on your computer, tablet or cell phone. Teachers can create quizzes and deploy them to students. Students complete the quizzes and the data is sent to the teacher in real-time. Results can be viewed, shared and even downloaded; making data collection a breeze!

You can create quizzes with true/false, multiple choice or short answer questions. Need to include images? No problem! Socrative allows you to embed images right in the question. You can even turn the quizzes into group competitions called space races to further student collaboration. There is also a generic exit ticket option for general understanding and lingering questions.

socrative quiz questonsocrative quiz resultssocrative space race

 

Come to our next Appy Hour on Friday, August 7th at the Faculty & Staff Resource Center on the Annandale Campus in room CG 206 if you are interested in learning more about Socrative and how you can use it in your classes!

If You Can’t Beat ’em, Join ’em

Get Kahoot LogoSo we all know how much of a struggle it is getting students to pay attention to the lesson and not to their smartphones. Well, why not incorporate their smartphones into the lesson!

Kahoot is a game-based blended learning and classroom response system. Create a free account and build quizzes, surveys, and discussions that your students can access and take part in right there in the classroom.

https://getkahoot.com/

GetKahootImage3

 

 

 

Minecraft – Not Just a Game…

MinecraftLogoIf you haven’t heard of Minecraft, you must be living under a rock. This is a gaming phenomenon that has swept the nation – and the world. My ten year old son plays it, my thirteen year old daughter plays it, and my forty-something husband plays it. Hundreds of YouTube channels are dedicated to Minecraft, filled with tutorials and screen-capture videos, created by enthusiasts from age 5 to age 95.

If you are not familiar with Minecraft, here is a great description by Mark Ward of BBC News:

“The game is set in a virtual world made of cubes of different materials – dirt, rock, sand, lava, obsidian and many more. Almost all of these can be used as building blocks and a few can be refined into usable raw materials (wood, iron, diamond etc).
Playing the game involves surviving by using blocks to build a shelter (which can be as crude or elaborate as you like) and turning raw materials and combinations of them into items (swords, armor, bows) to help kill the game’s many monsters (creepers, skeletons, zombie pigmen etc).” You can read Mark’s full article here.

I’m not just here to review a video game however. I would like to point out that Minecraft is NOT just a game. I could talk for hours about the many real life skills that can be acquired from playing Minecraft.  But I would like to talk briefly about Redstone. Redstone is one of the raw materials that can be “mined,” and it has properties that cause things to move or react in some way. In many cases, Redstone is used to make train tracks, conveyor belts or elevators that allow items to be carried from point A to point B. But more recently, people have been using Redstone to create machines such as printers, and computers. This really blew my mind!

I would like you to take a few minutes to watch a couple of these videos.

Minecraft 100% Working Printer

Redstone Computer (Interactive PC, Calculator, Day/Night Controller)

Interactive Redstone Computer (Calculator, 4 commands, Music, USB)

If you haven’t played Minecraft, give it a try – or at least ask the nearest ten year old of their thoughts on it.

Education and Cloud Technology in 2020

EduCloudHere’s an interesting article about how technology is becoming more and more integrated into education. The classroom is becoming a place where “teachers and students will have unprecedented access to tools for creative expression, and will find it even easier to share, to co-create and to experiment with new ideas.”

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/classroom-cloud-bright-forecast-2020-tacy-trowbridge?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=blog-classroom-cloud-2020

Hi There!

Welcome to the official blog of the Faculty and Staff Resource Center at Annandale! We assist faculty and staff in the development of classroom instructional materials, presentations, online courses, hybrid courses and websites. We offer professional development workshops covering many areas of technology, and assistance with computer hardware, software and special desktop publishing projects

We’ll be using this blog to post our training schedule and announcements, as well as other fun and/or interesting topics related to instructional technology!