Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Thing 15: BreakoutEDU

I think that I spent the most time on this website than any other website in both Cool Tool sessions. It was so much fun to play around and use those critical thinking skills. I think this would be a lot of fin for kids but also challenging. Kids love to solve puzzles, but I think they give up too easily and do not know how to use critical thinking skills. I think this is a great way to improve those critical thinking skills and to get kids out of the habit of giving up so easily.

I definitely would start off using this website as a whole group lesson. I would have the class come up and we were work through one together. After that, we can talk strategy and how to find clues. When I feel like the students are starting to understand the website, I will have them try it in groups of 3. I feel like it would be important for students to work in small groups at first because I do not want my students to work alone and get frustrated and give up. Students find critical thinking activities difficult and easily give up on them. I am hoping that working in small groups will help keep the students motivated and not want to give up so easily. When creating small groups, I would want to pick the groups so I can create heterogeneous groups so students at different levels can work together and be successful. This will also get students working with classmates that they might not normally with with, since I made the groupings, and help improve the social skills of the students in my classroom. Eventually when my students begin to start feeling more comfortable with the website, I would want them to start working alone. When students begin working on this website independently, I will make sure that I start off with easier tasks and when they become more comfortable and then slowly increase the difficult of the assignments.

I am looking forward to trying this out in class! I am planning on introducing it as a whole group next week during Common Core testing. I think it is a fun and exciting change in routine that would be motivating after taking a grueling test. Students probably will not even know that they are learning while they do it!

1 comment:

  1. Terrific! Sounds like you've got a great strategy for going forward with this. Thanks for sharing your ideas.

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