BrainRush is back online!

It's okay, we can exhale.  BrainRush, the adaptive learning site, is back online.  

I've blogged about BrainRush previously, and why it's my favorite online study and review platform.   BrainRush lets you create four different types of activities: matching (like for vocabulary flash cards), buckets (for sorting), chronologies (for sequencing), or hot spots (for labeling a diagram or map).  BrainRush practices with the students until they achieve mastery.

There are two things that make BrainRush so special.  First, questions get progressively more challenging, so it really does help students demonstrate mastery.  Second, the BrainRush questions adapt to each individual student's level of knowledge.  If a student answers incorrectly, then the student is given additional guided practice for that fact.

BrainRush activities are easy to create.  And now that it's back online, I'll be creating more activities for my students right away.

BrainRush: Network connectivity problems?

The BrainRush website hasn't been functioning for over 24 hours.  It's been a very frustrating 24 hours!  Instead of opening to this...

a user sees this:

No news on the @gobrainrush Twitter feed.  So the activities I created for my students using their terrific site are, for now, suspended.

My lessons on the Progressive Era

Certain things came together in planning my unit on the Progressive Era.

First, I'm working on integrating more EdTech into my teaching.  Second, a blizzard is heading our way so I wanted to create something that students could start in class and then work on while we are out for any snow days.  Finally, my students are all over the place in terms of interpreting primary sources and in structuring and writing essays.  To address that, I'm going back to add a high-degree of scaffolding, to reteach the weaker writers and reassure the stronger writers that they are doing it correctly.

Here's the workflow:

1. Essential vocabulary knowledge: I wrote a list of essential knowledge on a Google Doc and posted it to Google Classroom.  I then created a review game using BrainRush to help them learn the vocabulary.  (If you're not using BrainRush yet you should; it's terrific--fun for the students, and easy for you to create the activities as the teacher.)

2. The Progressive Era presidents: I wrote an alphabetical list of all the accomplishments of the Progressive Era presidents in a Google Doc and posted the list to Google Classroom.  Students were to take that list and, using their textbooks, sort the list to learn which accomplishment goes with which president.  I created a different review game using BrainRush to help the students learn the sort.

3. How effective was the Progressive Era in achieving its goals?  We will read and analyze documents from the 2003 AP U.S. History DBQ on this topic.  (The Scoring Guidelines for that DBQ are particularly helpful in highlighting the outside information, document information, and document inferences that your students will need to know.[*])  This will be a heavily scaffolded lesson; I will analyze the question and most of the documents with the students and give them a liberal opportunity to rewrite their work.

[*] Yes, yes, yes, this is an old-style DBQ.  But you can use it here as generic practice. 

4. Did it happen before or after the Civil War? My students are having difficulty keeping these two eras (Antebellum Era and Gilded Era) straight in their heads, so I wrote a list of events that first occurred either before or after the Civil War in a Google Doc and posted it to Google Classroom.  I created a different BrainRush review activity to help them practice.

5. Yes, I will be lecturing (a bit) for background information and to tie everything together into a narrative.  When I do, I will be delivering the presentation directly to students' smartphones using nearpod.  Like BrainRush, I love nearpod!  As I swipe the screen on my iPad, the lesson advances on the smartphones. 

6. And yes, my students will still have to read their textbooks.  But I wrote a Reading Guide for them to help them focus on what really matters. 

At the end of the lesson we'll have two quizzes: one on the material posted to Google Classroom, and one based on the textbook reading.

So, in sum: Essential learning conveyed to the students; technology to help them learn it; a whole-class lesson on using primary sources and practice writing an essay; limited lecturing but pushed directly to their devices; textbook reading; and some review (also using technology).

It will be a busy two weeks.

Another online game platform (but this one may be the best one yet for promoting mastery learning)

In a perfect world, we would monitor each student's learning and growth by name and need.  One student may need help with mastering causes of the War of 1812.  Another can't remember the 3/5 Compromise.  How to structure instruction so that each student's individualized needs are met?

A free online game platform that could certainly help is called BrainRush.
BrainRush allows you (or your students) to create learning games that adapt to the learning skill of each player.  To learn about BrainRush I took one of the activities that they had prepared on the Civil Rights Movement.  Whenever I answered a question incorrectly (whoops), that question was pushed back into the deck of upcoming questions.  It was then repeated in a different way several times, giving me extra chances to become confident in the correct answer and demonstrate my mastery.

This video (1:23) gives you a good short introduction to how BrainRush works.

BrainRush has four learning-game formats:

1. Cards Template: Just like flashcards.  Great for vocabulary; students match the front to the back of cards.
2. Buckets Template: A categorization activity; students drop and drag text, images, and/or audio into the correct bucket.
3. Sequencing Template: A chronology or list-order activity; students drag and drop items in order.
4. Hotspots Template: Students are presented with one image containing 10-15 hotspots, each one corresponding to a different concept to learn.  They match the concept to the hotspot on the map.  Hotspots Templates are best for diagrams and maps.

The last template was the most fun to create and play.  For my practice I uploaded a blank outline map of the contiguous 48 states, and created four hotspots.  I then associated a concept (like the Missouri Compromise Line) to each hotspot.

Playing my activity as a student, I was first shown the image (the map) with the four hotspots I had created.  My first concept was in the left margin, and in the first round, I had to click on the correct hotspot to demonstrate mastery.  Later in the Round 2 I was shown a hotspot and asked to type the correct concept in a dialogue box.

What was great was that I could not complete the activity until I gave correct answers to every concept.  And the activity was personalized for my learning.  Every time I made a mistake, questions about that topic were repeated (several times, interspersed with other questions) until I got it correct several times in a row.

Once you create your activity you post it to the online classroom that you create for your students.

One thing that's great about BrainRush is the amount of online teacher support it gives.  It currently has 9 general video tutorials and three other describing BrainRush's game templates.

BrainRush makes creating engaging and effective activities that promote individualized mastery learning that much more achievable.