I often get asked, what are you working on that’s exciting. Here are four products that can impassion kids and teachers.
TeacherGaming
We all know how kids love video games; even when they fail they persist and master the skills they need to level up. Many of us have tried to introduce “educational” video games, but kids quickly pick up that these just aren’t the same. And a lot of video games just aren’t appropriate; we don’t want to encourage the types of scenarios they enact.
TeacherGaming finds widely used video games that kids want to play and that have educational value, they then develop lesson plans around those games, and place the games in a system where a parent or teacher can keep tabs on what the students are doing and learning. They have games that cover Kindergarten through grade 8, and over 300 lesson plans that hit academic topics in Math, ELA, Coding, Science, History, Social Studies, Music, and 21st Century Skills. Here are a few samples:
3DBear AR
Kids really flipped over Pokemon Go. Imagine if they could set up their own virtual scenes instead of just following what others created, and if those scenes could illustrate what they are learning through reading, social studies, history, math, and science?
In 3DBear AR (which works on iOS and Android devices), students use 3D Designed objects to build scenes that they can then interact with. 3DBear comes with over a dozen lesson plans, but we find that teachers and parents can use it for virtually any subject with students from grade1 through high school. As an example, here is a teacher interacting with a virtual castle and dinosaur.
Answerables
Every teacher or home teaching parent needs a system to track and assign content to their kids. But what’s more boring than an LMS?
Does this look like a typical LMS?
Answerables is different from any LMS you’ve ever seen. Answerables is built inside a video game. Kids explore their virtual world and gain points and add new skills as they advance through the materials and exercises that the teacher or parent assigns. Answerables makes it easy for you to keep the fun in learning for your students.
SiLAS
Part of education is molding students’ emotional intelligence and social skills, and SiLAS works for all students, but especially kids on the autistic spectrum or who are having trouble relating to and with other children.
SiLAS allows kids (and teachers and parents) to create animated snippets that simulated social interactions with characters who can show real emotions. For example, after a session on bullying, a teacher can have the student enact a video of a potential bullying situation with animated characters, and then the can discuss it with the student and ask the student to adjust the video based on feedback. Studies show that this type of play-acting is incredibly effective at advancing social skills.
SiLAS comes with lesson plans for common social interactions where kids often experience difficulties, such as bullying, disagreement, greetings, and picking up on social cues.
And I’m always excited by the interesting presenters on Edchat Interactive.
Anyone wanting a demo of or to be put in contact with these companies, just let me know.