Quizlet App
I think the Quizlet app is a great resource for students. Quizlet gives students a level of personalization, which Lee and Cherner specify as one of the components of app evaluation (Lee & Cherner, 2015 p. 34) . Students are able to choose how they will study—either through flash cards, matching, writing, or a test. They also control the pace of their learning, as there is no time limit for studying the material (34). Moreover, there is a degree of teacher feedback, as teachers can sort students into classes to monitor progress (28). Overall, I think this is a great app for students, even if it is more limited than the website version.
Paperblanks
This app provides students with randomized writing prompts. They are able to personalize the app in two ways: (Lee & Cherner, 2015 p.34) first, they can choose a notebook cover from a selection of images, which serves as the background for the app. Second, they can create a favorites list of prompts to refer back to. This would be a great app for practicing writing, as our standards require us to have students writing for a variety of purposes. I also think that the app provides for creative experiences, which is something Zickermann says is important in his TEDTalk (TEDxTalk, 2014).
Johnny G
I think this app is a good starting place for practicing grammar, but it isn’t perfect. For example, one thing I loved about this app was its learner control. Students use this app to practice three components of the English language—writing, spelling, and grammar. Students are given topics in each of these categories to master. They can see all of the topics for the category, as well as the difficulty level of each topic. This way, students can begin by choosing a topic they are comfortable with (Lee & Cherner, 2015 p.33). It was also very interactive, which, according to Lee and Cherner, requires “answering questions, making decisions, or performing other observable actions” (34). Students had 60 seconds to answer as many fill-in-the-blank questions they could—the answers were presented in a multiple-choice format. Students also won badges and spots on a global leader board for answering the fastest. These last two elements are also important because they are common elements of gamification that keep students motivated-- they want the most badges and to be the highest on the leader board (CUEinc, C, 2014).
Emoji Shakespeare
This game has a fun concept, but it could be a lot more relevant to my content. Students are given a speech from a Shakespeare play, with words removed. They have a list of emojis that acts as a word bank, and they fill in the blanks by dragging appropriate emojis into them. I think that this is a nice interactive activity, as it gets students making decisions about the text and performing a kinesthetic action by physically dragging the emoji (Lee & Cherner, 2015 p.34). I also think that this activity would be high interest, as students enjoy emojis and puzzles (35). I’ve used emojis for lessons before and have seen that they do make things more interesting. However, I don’t think this app has much utility because the number of available puzzles is very limited (35). I can’t use it to review Romeo and Juliet, for example, because all that is available for that play is one part of the balcony scene. While students would find this fun, I don’t think they would consider it to be a useful review. However—I can see the benefit of using this game as a model for them to create their own Shakespeare emoji puzzles, which I think I might look into for this year’s Shakespeare unit.
Mimir's Vision
This is a really cool app that allows students to do a VR tour of Norse mythology on their phones. Students allow camera access to the app, which uses sensors to locate a flat surface through the camera lens. It then overlays an interactive map that students can use to find information about important realms and characters from Norse mythology. The app lines up perfectly with its objective (Lee & Churner, 2015, p. 26)-- there are tons of locations to explore, descriptions to read, and pictures to view. Moreover, the game has a great aesthetic and high interest (35). I want to use this as a resource for students when they do their mythology projects.
References
- Lee, C-Y. & Cherner, T. S. (2015). A comprehensive evaluation rubric for assessing instructional apps. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research, 14, 21-53. Retrieved January 22, 2015 from http://www.jite.org/documents/Vol14/JITEV14ResearchP021-053Yuan0700.pdf
- TEDxTalks. (2014, February 25). The future of creativity and innovation is gamification: Gabe Zichermann at TEDxVilnius. Retrieved August 10, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZvRw71Slew&t=6s
- CUEinc, C. (2014, November 30). Classroom gamification tips for even the non-gamer. Retrieved August 10, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDn5FM7aX1s