Tech EDGE is a catalog full of ideas for apps for teachers to use in their classroom. It is accessible through their YouTube Channel. This helps teachers get ideas about apps they may want to use in their classroom and narrows it down to what apps are classroom friendly. There are a number of videos to watch that inform teachers and students about technology that can be made available to assist in learning. I feel this is definitely something that will be useful in my own future classroom and would suggest it to any teacher or student.
Classcraft
Classcraft intrigued me just from the name of it because I am a person who LOVES crafting. This is a free website and app that is compatible with Google Classroom. This app makes it a virtual classroom that has teams of students, picked by the teacher. Students have choices of who they want their character to be. Students progress through this game and earn rewards throughout. This is a game that gives students extra motivation to do specific things in the classroom. The teacher can set the goals and punishments for not reaching the goals. This app is wonderful because it puts some pressure off the teacher for worrying about singling students out. The consequences are universal. This teaches accountability because students do not want to let their team down. The app also gets parents involved. The app has a lot of benefits such as teaching teamwork and how students need to do their duty to keep the team together. However, it does not have specific content it teaches and could be a distraction for students to be playing with instead of something to simply boost the need for students to complete tasks.
Sim city build it
Sim City Build It is a free app which allows students to make their own city and have "sims" or animated people, that they have to keep happy and healthy. Students have to add things such as a police or fire station in the city, schools, homes, parks, and more. The students design roads and create this to be a city just like a real one. This teaches students things such as how to organize their money and budget, economics, geography, and math. Although the app has some things students can learn from, I feel it would be easy to get distracted from the learning. Staying on task could be difficult, so the teacher would need to make sure they were asking questions about what students have taken away and keeping it as a learning tool.
Geography games
Lizard Points is an app mentioned in a YouTube video about geography games. In this app, students are given a map and asked questions to find certain places. They earn points based on the questions they get correctly. I think this app is a good learning tool to teach students the memorization of maps, however I wish it had questions such as "Find the country that has the greatest oil exports in the world." or questions that made students think more critically and apply knowledge about geography, instead of just memorizing maps. It is a good app to use to study for tests over memorizing placement of countries, but I feel students would memorize the places and forget them after a test. It could be good to use this app just for about 10 minutes a week to refresh memory of where each country is located, but does not provide much learning beyond memorization.
