Legos on Build with Chrome (An Early Introduction to 3D Building on a 2D Screen)

Legos are fantastic! They encourage creativity, cooperation, planning, revising, constant improvement, and many other personal and professional skills. Unfortunately, all of that valuable learning is expensive and those expensive pieces are hard to clean up.

Thankfully, Google and Lego have teamed up to create Build With Chrome and provide people all over the world with their very own virtual Legos. The name is a bit misleading because you're not building with silvery-colored chrome blocks; it's actually taking place in the Chrome operating system and it uses all the familiar Lego bricks (blocks, flat pieces, round and cone shaped ones, etc.)

Chrome can be downloaded onto iPads and is already on Chromebooks. Students can build without logging in or signing up. Although, saving their Lego creations requires signing into Google. In my class students usually create something in BuildWithChrome, screenshot/Print Screen it, open it in Notability, and then label the important parts.

For example, two weeks ago my students wrapped up a unit on the early colonies by researching and re-creating a colony or settlement. We learned about Plymouth, Jamestown, Roanoke and the neighboring Native American civilizations and only mentioned "there were other colonies." This was an opportunity for them to use critical thinking and research skills to learn about new colonies.

The students were given two days in the computer lab to research and build their colony. On the third day they photographed (screenshot) their colonies and labeled them (What is this? What does it tell us about the inhabitants? etc.). It was a very successful project because students had fun thinking like an forensic archaeologist and doing research like a historian. When the project was over students could explain the significance of a stone wall versus a wooden fence (stone walls defended against other European canons/ wood only protected from hand-held Native American weapons) and understood colonists got their water from a community well. By looking at other students' projects they also saw the difference between strategic colonies with military forts, like San Juan and St. Augustine, and commercial or religious colonies, like Jamestown or Plymouth.

Here are some other ideas for using Build With Chrome:

• Create a Biome: Students can research the temperature, precipitation, flora and fauna of a biome and create it. What color should the floor be? Why? What animal is that? 
• Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians, and Fish: Have students recreate one of these vertebrates and label the features as well as the distinctive features of the group.
• Build a Process: Recycling, the water cycle, Three Branches of Government, and a number of other processes are easier to understand (and assess) if students can create their own representation of the process.

However you decide to use it, here's some advice:

1) Give Them a Rubric: This tells them what they are going to need in order to meet your standards. It also gives them autonomy and freedom to create something original and awesome. This also gives you something concrete to point at when you ask them, "ok, I see you've created an amazing spaceship, but the rubric says you need to represent a Native American village."

2) Use a Computer: Doing this on an iPad or other tablet is possible, but it is very difficult. Use something with a track pad, or better yet, an actual mouse.

Build With Chrome is very similar to AutoCAD software, it's just simpler and uses bricks. The ability to make things in three-dimensions on a two-dimensional computer is already an essential skill for engineers, interior designers, and many other professions. Using Build With Chrome will start to build this important skill!

Have fun!

GoFormative: The Best Ed-Tech of 2015 (maybe ever)

Watch this video about GoFormative.

Still interested? This is, without a doubt, the most valuable assessment tool I've ever used. For starters, it is web-based like Kahoot and Google Drive so it can be accessed anywhere (on any device) so long as it has an internet connection. Furthermore, the student doesn't need an account, username, or password. All they need is a four-letter, three-digit code provided by the teacher. Each code is linked to a specific GoFormative activity.

Once students are in it is possible to get live updates of what they are doing on each question. If one of my students is lining the decimals up the wrong way I know they should be in a small group of other students making the same mistake. Is he or she the only one making that mistake, well, then maybe I should make my way over to their desk and correct the problem now.

When students complete the GoFormative, they hit submit and (depending on the question type) their answers are corrected automatically (short answer, multiple choice) or left for me to correct (short answer or show your work).

Then I can use this data in grade books and, more importantly, deciding how to modify instruction or structure small-groups.

Basically, GoFormative can be used to create quizzes or to turn PDF worksheets into self-correcting forms. However, the power of this app goes far beyond simply digitizing paper!

How do I use it in my classroom?

Morning Check-in: 

Every morning when my students come in there's a GoFormative waiting for them on Edmodo. When they arrive at the GoFormative there are about ten questions which will take them between five and fifteen minutes to answer.

There are usually four academic questions, one each for math, literacy, science and social studies. These questions are carefully chosen (often from classwork) to tell me whether or not students have mastered daily/weekly/unit learning targets. Starting the day out knowing who needs more help and who needs acceleration is invaluable and, as far as I'm concerned, there's not better tool for this kind of morning assessment. An added bonus of putting the link in Edmodo? Their mere presence in the GoFormative tells me who knows how to log-in to Edmodo. It's amazing how many kids can log-in to Edmodo everyday for three weeks and then, one day, forget their password.

After the academic questions come logistical "questions." About three times a week students are asked to take a screen shot of the lock screen. This screen shot shows me the battery level and today's date. On the next question the students are asked to share the battery percentage and this question is auto-corrected. Students with a low battery get bothered by me and, two weeks in, low batteries are very low in my class. Similarly, about once a week, students are asked to take a picture of their iPad bag, cord and charger with the barcode facing the camera. This ensures students don't wait until the last week of school to announce their cord or charger is missing.

Finally, most morning check-ins involve homework turn-in. The students take a screen-shot or photograph of their homework and upload it into a "Show Your Work" problem. If students are struggling on the academic questions, having the homework helps me diagnose the problem. Are they assuming all colonies were English? Did they fail to understand the temperature and precipitation graph? Honestly, I'm not big on homework, but I do give it so students can practice important skills already learned in class and, sometimes, because I need to see a student do something six times to really determine how well (or poorly) they understand the concept or topic.

Stations: 

Running stations is always a challenge if you're the only teacher in the room. Having four students at five different stations makes it hard to monitor all of the learning. Having GoFormative up and running on my iPad allows me to move around the room and talk to groups, while still looking at the streaming data from other tables. Josh is drawing pictures of minions again and Tania is making an excessively detailed drawing of a longhouse. Fortunately, based on the photos they've uploaded, it's clear the CalTech group understands the value of iron tools in the New World. All of this can be seen while I sit at a table and watch another group re-build the fort at St. Augustine using primary documents and a box of Legos!

Class Discussions:

The short answer questions are very helpful for class discussions because all of the students' answers can be displayed simultaneously (albeit very small). By clicking on individual responses the teacher can make these responses larger. It's a really smooth platform for asking discussion questions and then critiquing answers as a large group.

Close Reading (Experimental)

Warning: I haven't had tremendous success with this...yet. However, I am trying to guide my students close reading skills by uploading PDF texts (like NewsELA) and then putting question boxes into the text. My goal is for students to read the text and see that I have a question about the text. In so doing, they will stop, ask themselves, "why is Mr. Stewart interested in this section," and after a hundred repetitions will ask questions for themselves.

These boxes in the text can also be a place for students to comment on a quote or sentence; share a connection to a previous topic; or share a picture explaining what they they think a Sauropod looks like.

I'll report back on how this works.


Finally, there's the question of feedback and exporting data. Yes and yes. Feedback can be immediate if students are logged-in. As far as exporting data it can be done via Excel, but there's almost too much data (like the number of points possible per question). This is one area where GoFormative could improve. In the future I would love to see the ability to export into Google Drive or, even better, connect directly with the Edmodo gradebook!

Best of luck and please share how you are using GoFormative in your classroom! If you have any questions the people at GoFormative are very prompt about answering questions.