In a world where education is constantly evolving, the need for innovative tools that ignite students’ creativity and passion for learning is more important than ever.

Night Zookeeper, an interactive online platform, is revolutionizing the way teachers inspire imagination in their classrooms.

In this post, we will explore how Night Zookeeper can foster creativity in the classroom.

Unleashing Creativity in the Classroom: How Night Zookeeper Sparks Students’ Imagination

What is Night Zookeeper?

Night Zookeeper is an educational online program for children aged 6 to 12+ (Grades 1 to 6) that uses gamified learning to help them develop reading and writing skills.

It offers a full language arts curriculum while transforming “boring school work” into fun and engaging games, challenges, interactive lessons, and collaborative projects – children often don’t even realize they’re working!

Night Zookeeper also provides a safe space for all children, including awesome community and blog pages which they’re free to explore and use to further improve their reading and writing skills.

A team of highly qualified tutors reviews all content shared within the program.

Are you ready to make reading and writing fantastically fun for your students?

*Related: 3 Essential Guides for Teachers: Adapting Instruction to Every Student Ability

At its core, Night Zookeeper is designed to make learning fun and engaging. The platform revolves around a captivating world where students create and interact with magical animals, embark on quests, and engage in creative writing challenges. It’s this blend of storytelling and interactive gameplay that captures the imagination of young minds, making them excited about learning.

One of the most significant ways Night Zookeeper sparks creativity is through its focus on creative writing. Students are encouraged to write stories, poems, and reports about their unique magical animals. This not only helps improve their writing skills but also allows them to express themselves in a safe, imaginative environment. As they create their narratives, they learn the power of language and storytelling, skills vital in all areas of education and life.

Another aspect where Night Zookeeper shines is in its ability to personalize learning. Every student’s journey is unique, with the platform adapting to their specific learning pace and style. This personalized approach ensures that students remain engaged and motivated, as tasks are neither too easy nor too challenging. It’s in this tailored learning environment that creativity flourishes – students feel confident to explore, make mistakes, and learn from them, which is essential for creative growth.

*Related: Say Hello to FigJam: Your Jamboard Alternative with Endless Possibilities

Check out Night Zookeeper’s downloadable learning resources, great for getting your child excited about reading & writing.

Night Zookeeper for Schools and Teachers

Teachers are not left behind in this creative journey. Night Zookeeper offers a suite of tools for educators to track student progress, provide personalized feedback, and integrate the platform’s resources into their lesson plans. This ease of integration means that teachers can effectively use Night Zookeeper to complement their teaching methods, making lessons more dynamic and impactful.

Night Zookeeper is more than just an educational platform; it’s a catalyst for creativity in the classroom. By blending the art of storytelling with interactive and gamified learning, it provides a unique space for students to explore, imagine, and create. For teachers looking to spark imagination and foster a love for learning in their students, Night Zookeeper is a valuable resource worth exploring.

Get the FREE Trial!

Classroom Reading & Writing Program

• Make reading & writing fun for your students!
• Boost their vocabulary, spelling, and grammar!
• Save yourself hours of grading time!

*Please note that this post contains affiliate links, and I may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through these links. This helps support the maintenance of this blog and allows me to continue sharing valuable content.

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

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Let’s have some fun with Winter Magnetic Poetry with Google Slides!

Winter is coming! Well, at least for some of you. Things are still pretty warm here in Texas!

This is the third installment of magnetic poetry templates that I have shared.

Magnetic Poetry

Lynn Kleinmeyer’s Students Using Winter Magnetic Poetry

What is Magnetic Poetry?

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

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Who’s ready for a little Halloween fun? Try Halloween Magnetic Poetry with Google Drawings!

I’ve created a Halloween-themed magnetic poetry template with Google Drawings for you and your students.

There are nearly 100 words in this one, so adapt the words that are appropriate for your grade levels. You can use this as an independent activity, or take it a step further and make it a collaborative activity and see how the poetry evolves. You can use the “magnets” included, or even add your own text boxes to extend the activity.

(Note: The words I created are actually images and cannot be edited, but you can delete them. The images give you more of the “magnet” effect. You can add your own by creating a new text box and filling it with a white background, or right-click on the name box and copy it to use.)

To learn how to create your own, enroll in my free mini-course!

Get the Halloween Template

Click here to use the template | Click here to make a copy

Please make a copy of the template BEFORE assigning this to your students! 

I repeat! Please make a copy of the template BEFORE assigning this to your students!

How to Assign Templates in Google Classroom

Please share your student creations with other teachers!

I also love to see pics of this in action on Twitter. Use the hashtag #ShakeUpLearning!

Or, share in the comments below this post!

Check out the other Magnetic Poetry posts:

• Collaborative Magnetic Poetry with Google Drawings
• Winter Magnetic Poetry with Google Slides

How to Create Magnetic Poetry Mini-Course

Want to learn how to make your own magnetic poetry and other types of interactive lessons?

Jump into my FREE mini-course, How to Create Magnetic Poetry with Google Slides and Drawings.

In this course, are two, quick, video-based lessons to show you how to create the background and create your own word images. All self-paced! Learn when and where you want! Easy peasy!

CLICK HERE TO ENROLL!

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

The post Halloween Magnetic Poetry with Google Drawings! appeared first on Shake Up Learning.

As a former reading teacher, I know how difficult it can be to support struggling readers, English Language Learners, and to improve the fluency of all of my students.

I wish I’d had Fluency Tutor to help!

I don’t endorse a lot of products, but Texthelp produces some of the best accessibility tools and they work seamlessly with my favorite Google tools.

You can get access to Fluency Tutor for FREE, and it’s perfect for remote learning.

Below is some information to get you started.

FREE access to Fluency Tutor for Google Chrome 

The folks over at Texthelp have created some amazing accessibility tools to support all students, including digital tools to support literacy, struggling readers, and ELL. Oh, and since Texthelp is a Google for Education partner, their tools work seamlessly with your Google login, and integrate with Google Drive and Google Classroom.

One of my favorite Texthelp tools is Fluency Tutor for Google. And, Texthelp has recently dropped some MAJOR news for this product. Texthelp is currently providing FREE access for students, teachers, and parents to Fluency Tutor for Google Chrome through the end of the school year! 

What is Fluency Tutor?

“Fluency Tutor for Google is a Chrome app designed to help students improve reading fluency while saving busy teachers valuable time. And because it’s web-based it’s great for remote learning. 

Fluency Tutor helps students of all ages and ability levels become more avid, engaged, and confident readers. What’s more, it gives teachers a clear picture of every child’s reading attainment and progress over time.

This easy-to-use app lets students record themselves reading aloud on their laptop, Chromebook, or tablet, from the comfort of their own home, and then send it to their teacher for feedback.”

Fluency Tutor is great for emerging readers in grades K – 4 and struggling readers or English language learners in older grades.

Introduction to Fluency Tutor

Student View

Benefits

• Makes reading aloud fun and satisfying for readers of all ages, abilities and grade levels
• Saves time for busy teachers, allowing them to focus on other classroom tasks
• Encourages students to practice reading aloud at their own pace without direct supervision in a relaxed environment, at school or at home
• Simple, friendly and seamless: one easy-to-use app for teachers and students
• Allows reluctant students to freely choose their own reading content
• Frees teachers to listen to each student’s reading progress wherever and whenever it suits them best
• Give students extra help with text-to-speech, dictionary, picture dictionary and translate tool
• Great for early readers, and individuals learning English as a second language (ESL)
• Integrates seamlessly with G Suite for Education, Google Drive, and Classroom
• Plays nicely on any device: Chrome browser app for PCs, Macs, and Chromebooks

Features

• Friendly dashboard interface for teachers and students
• Teachers can pick from the pre-selected library of over 500 leveled reading passages, based on content, Lexile level or reading age
• Teachers can also create reading passages from existing curriculum materials or online sources
• Students can pick their own reading passages that interest them – great for reluctant readers
• Share passages with individual students, or with the entire class using Google Classroom ‘share’ button
• Passages appear in student’s Google Drive
• Students can record their own assigned reading passages whenever and wherever it suits them
• Extra help with text-to-speech, dictionary, picture dictionary, and translate tools
• Quick Score gives immediate feedback to students without the need for a full assessment

How Much?

• Texthelp is currently providing FREE access for students, teachers, and parents to Fluency Tutor for Google Chrome 

How to Get Fluency Tutor for Google 

• Install the Fluency Tutor for Google Chrome App in the Google Chrome browser.
• Sign-in to Fluency Tutor with your Google account.
• Get Started! Here’s the Fluency Tutor for Google YouTube playlist to help you learn the basics. 
  

Check out these related posts:

• How to Create a Dynamic Reading Experience
• How to Check Spelling and Grammar in Google Docs
• How to Easily Assess Writing in Google Docs
• 9 Ways to Improve Student Writing with Google Docs

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

The post FREE Access to Fluency Tutor to Support Student Literacy Remotely appeared first on Shake Up Learning.

Assess Student Writing in Google Docs with WriQ

WriQ is a FREE tool that helps teachers easily assess writing in Google Docs.

This Google Chrome extension helps teachers not only assess writing, including grammar, punctuation, spelling and more but also helps teachers track progress over time.

Below is a guest post outlining the features and recent updates.

Please note, this is a guest post, not sponsored.

How to Easily Assess Student Writing in Google Docs

This is a guest post by Mark Schwartz from Texthelp.

All teachers can agree that assessing student writing is a tedious and time-consuming process. Plus, monitoring student progress and analyzing their growth over the course of the year can be even more difficult. At Texthelp, we’ve spent the last several years coming up with a solution to give teachers some of their precious time back without diminishing the value of their feedback or the instruction to their students. And that solution is WriQ®.

WriQ, a Chrome Extension for Google Docs, is a writing achievement and assessment tool that supports both teachers and students in the writing process. For the teacher, WriQ saves time by auto-marking spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors, as well as seamlessly integrating rubrics for delivering qualitative feedback. For the student, it uses a combination of gamification, nudge theory, and research around writing bursts, to motivate them to work on improving their writing.

Step 1: Assessing a Paper

(If you’d prefer to see WriQ in action, you can view this short video).

Using WriQ to assess student work is easy. After installing the extension from the Chrome Store, open a student’s writing in a Google Doc and click on the caret to show the sidebar. (Note that the first time you use WriQ, you will have to identify yourself as a teacher, and will have to register to save a score and access other features).  

Once the sidebar is open, you will see the auto-scoring features of WriQ: 

• Accuracy percentage (based on correct word sequences)
• Spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors
• Word count 
• Vocabulary maturity (based on age of acquisition) 
• Time on task (time spent actually writing or editing)

You’ll also see that any errors that WriQ found are now underlined within the student’s document. It is important that you check through the document to change or add any errors that WriQ may have missed or got wrong. If you do see any missed or mismarked errors, simply click where the error occurred, and change (or ignore) it.  

Once you’ve completed the quantitative assessment of your student’s writing, you can move on to the qualitative assessment through the use of WriQ’s built-in rubrics that are specific to the grade and genre chosen at the start of the grading process. That’s right, no more manually marking a printed chart. Instead, simply choose the correct criterion level that best matches the student’s writing for each assessment area. WriQ will automatically do the calculations and the rubric visualizations for you. 

Note that teachers can create custom rubrics if their students have a premium license of WriQ. For more information on how to set up and use custom rubrics, see the related blog post.

Once you’ve completed all your grading, WriQ generates an image with an overview of your assessment, which can be inserted directly into the student’s paper for real-time feedback. The image includes your written feedback to the student, the metrics generated from WriQ’s auto-marking, a helpful visualization of the rubric, and a WriQ Score.

Step 2: Tracking Progress

(If you’d prefer to see the WriQ dashboard in action, you can view this short video).

After a student’s paper has been graded, the information will be entered into the teacher’s dashboard, which contains data for each student and all of their documents that have been scored with WriQ. This will allow educators to track individual student growth, while also enabling them to compare their students’ results to local and national norms. 

Step 3: The Student Experience

(If you’d prefer to see the WriQ student experience in action, you can view this short video).

The student experience in WriQ focuses on student motivation, using a combination of gamification, nudge theory, and research around writing bursts. 

After getting the extension installed, students will see the WriQ icon in their Chrome Extensions bar. When they open a Google Doc and select the WriQ Chrome Extension, a small box will appear in the bottom, right-hand corner of their Doc. (Note: If it’s their first time accessing WriQ, they’ll have to go through a quick tutorial before getting started.) 

This small box is the “WriQMeter”, which tracks Writing Bursts. Writing Burst length is a measure of writing fluency – the longer the burst, the higher the fluency.  By enabling students to track their own bursts, they can see their progress over time and get the internal motivation they need to keep improving. 

All students will be able to track their best and total bursts for that day, while premium licensed students will be able to see their progress weekly, monthly, and annually. This encourages students to spend more time writing, to write more words, and to write across different subject areas.

Bursts, however, are not the only thing that WriQ measures. Word clouds and subject keywords from the Academic Word List provide insight into how much writing a student is doing in different subject areas, and which words students are using the most.

In future releases, badges and other rewards will offer additional motivation to continue encouraging students to achieve in writing. 

Have you had a chance to try WriQ yet? If not, install it today to see how it can revolutionize how you assess writing. And, if you’d like to try WriQ for free with your students, please fill out our WriQ Pilot Request Form, and someone will be in touch shortly! 

Want more?

Check out these releated posts:

• 9 Ways to Improve Student Writing with Google Docs
• How to Cite Sources in Google Docs

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

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Welcome to week three of the 2015 Shake Up Learning Super Sweepstakes!

IXL

Aligned to Standards

FREE Trial

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

The post The Adaptive Learning Platform You Need to Know About: IXL! appeared first on Shake Up Learning.

Using Google Chrome Extensions to Support Struggling Readers and English Language Learners

Google Chrome has so much to offer teachers and students, AND there are so many fantastic apps and extensions to support struggling readers. Text-to-speech is a great way to support struggling readers–it’s reading with your ears!

Benefits of Text-to-Speech for Readers

• Relieves the burden of decoding
• Focus on comprehension
• Improve fluency and endurance
• Identify and correct more errors

There are several text-to-speech apps and extensions. Below are three that I find useful for the classroom.

 

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

The post 3 Text-to-Speech Chrome Extensions to Support Struggling Readers and ELL appeared first on Shake Up Learning.

2 New Google Apps for iOS Released!

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

The post Google Cardboard Comes to iOS – Now 52 Google Apps for iPad! appeared first on Shake Up Learning.

Collaborative Magnetic Poetry with Google Drawings!

That’s right! I’ve created a magnetic poetry interactive template with Google Drawings that you and your students can use to get creative during National Poetry Month.

You can use this as an independent activity, or take it a step further and make it a collaborative activity and see how the poetry evolves.

You can use the “magnets” included, or even add your own to extend the activity (tutorial and FREE mini-course information below).

[Tweet “Collaborative Magnetic Poetry with #GoogleDrawings! #engchat #edtech #gsuiteedu”]

Get the FREE Collaborative Magnetic Poetry Template!

Click here to use the template | Click here to make a copy.

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

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• #GoogleEduOnAir (May 8-9)
• #TXGoo15, May 16: Texas Summit feature Google for Education (New Caney, TX)
• TCEA Area 16 Conference Jamboree, June 4 (Amarillo, TX)
• Prosper ISD Tech Conference, June 10 (Prosper, TX)
• Speed 21 Conference, June 11 (Wylie, TX)
• Texas ASCD Ignite, June 15-17 (Irving, TX)
• iPadpalooza, June 23-25 (Austin, TX)
• ISTE, June 28-July 1 (Philadelphia, PA)

 

© Shake Up Learning 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Kasey Bell and Shake Up Learning with appropriate and specific direction to the original content on ShakeUpLearning.com. See: Copyright Policy.

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