NIS Learning Curve

Children love games and stories, and what better way to engage your teen to be more  responsible for their learning than a game-based approach to learning? A little excitement  and competition can motivate learners to engage with what they are working on. Classcraft is an online fantasy-themed behaviour- and learning-management role-playing  game (also available as Chrome, Android, and iOS apps). It's cool graphics and avatars  make this a hit with grade 6 and up. When it comes to content delivery, Classcraft is built around narrative “quests” which  move students through a storyline, while at the same time asking them to complete  various activities, challenges, and/or lessons. Teacher-created Quests can be a unique way  to immerse students in learning or reviewing concepts, and teachers may find they're  worth the extra setup time. It makes things very interactive, you could start the class  with events, and use that as a warm-up activity, ...

  Wizer  can be a great tool for teachers who want to quickly assess understanding of specific concepts. Using Wizer teachers can create meaningful, engaging learning experiences for their students with augmented worksheets.  Multiple activities can be embedded in one place giving students options for visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic learning modalities. Students can label images, categorize information, respond to open-ended and multiple-choice questions, or respond to video content.  Teachers will have to sign up for an account, to start browsing or creating worksheets. Once logged in, you can choose a template and then add a title along with written and/or voice-recorded instructions (for paid versions) and create their questions based on videos, images, charts, tables, and more. Students can worksheets assigned to them on computers or mobile devices via LMS logins (Google classroom, Edmodo, Microsoft), a class code, or a link to a URL or tea...

Online ‘interactives' are becoming commonplace in higher education as a way of presenting Blended Active Learning experiences, and the advent of easy-to-use tools means that you don't have to be an experienced multimedia designer to create content. Teachers and learners are now able to design and develop their own activities, and HP5 is the ideal authoring tool for this type of content. H5P( HTML 5 Package) has some great tools to make your content pages more interactive. The platform empowers everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content - all you need is a web browser and a web site that supports H5P (for example Google sites/ Blogger / Weebly, WordPress, Moodle etc). You can see a few examples at the end of this article.  H5P was created for teachers to use, to make online courses more interactive and engaging for students. In all, there are 40 types of interactive content available to create on H5P, with the “featured” tools bei...

  Instructional Strategy#13: Claim, Evidence, Reasoning (CER) This strategy provides a scaffolded way for students to use evidence to formulate and justify their own arguments by breaking down materials and research into smaller pieces for analysis.                                                                                                                                                              (Click on the images to enlarge) McNeill, K. L., & Krajcik, J. (2008). Inquiry and scientific explanations: He...

Instructional Strategy#12: Create the Problem This mathematics-focused instructional activity has students create a hypothetical problem that matches a given real-world solution.                                                                                                   (Click on the images to enlarge) Keeley, P., & Tobey, C. (2011). #11. Create the problem. In Mathematics Formative Assessment: 75 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning (p. 80). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, SAGE.                                                               ...

If you are looking for a part calculator, part interactive simulation tool, Desmos is a standout example of inquiry-driven math tool with super-smart instructional supports. Desmos is an easy-to-use tool that gives students a visual way to understand expressions. It is a Graphing Calculator app that provides features beyond those of a regular calculator, allowing users to graph functions, create tables, simulations and more.  The site boasts a huge collection of activities in accordance with IGCSE and AS/A level requirements. The tool is free and is available on the web as well as on iOS and Android. In addition to plotting equations, classroom activities are available to help students learn about a variety of math concepts. For example, students can learn how to transform periodic functions by trying to slide marbles through points on a graph. Or they can plug in their own equation and see what kind of graph pops up; sliders allow students to adjust values and see w...