Knowledge Constructor
ISTE Standard for Students 3
Students critically curate a variety of resources using digital tools to construct knowledge, produce creative artifacts and make meaningful learning experiences for themselves and others.
3a: Students plan and employ effective research strategies to locate information and other resources for their intellectual or creative pursuits.
3b: Students evaluate the accuracy, perspective, credibility, and relevance of information, media, data, or other resources.
3c: Students curate information from digital resources using a variety of tools and methods to create collections of artifacts that demonstrate meaningful connections or conclusions.
3d: Students build knowledge by actively exploring real-world issues and problems, developing ideas and theories, and pursuing answers and solutions.
Tool demonstrated: Wordwall
What is Wordwall? Hold on, hold on, I’m getting there!
Wordwall is an activity-based learning website where teachers can create their own educational quizzes, matching games, random question selectors, game shows, interactive diagrams, and more! With a free Wordwall account any teacher can search the Wordwall database for pre-made lessons by other teachers or create their own activities for students to complete individually or as a class. Many potential activity templates are locked behind a “Pro Account” paywall, but the activities a free account gives teachers and students access to are plenty engaging.
While not offering a direct, real-time quiz experience—like some apps like Kahoot! do—Wordwall excels in the generation of individual resources and quizzes for students to do at home. Through the usage of Wordwall’s random question selectors, such as the Random Wheel that spins and selects a custom question for the class, classes taught in real time are able to have more random yet teacher-scripted elements thrown into the mix, increasing excitement and engagement through game mechanics. Even students themselves can log in with a Wordwall or Google account and make up to five free custom activities for themselves—perfect for studying and making educational artifacts to share with classmates.
Want to see a slide deck and screencasted demonstration of Wordwall? Check out the embedded Google Slides document I created with my MIT colleagues to evangelize about the service! Want to read my process reflection instead? Just keep scrolling!
Reflection:
In a nutshell: Wordwall offers students and teachers alike the technology to easily create hyper-interactive and hyper-shareable knowledge artifacts evaluating knowledge of any given topic. With a simple user interface, students unfamiliar with this style of self-directed tech artifact creation can build their own gameified educational resources.
A class project in third grade had my class using Windows computers and some specialized piece of software I’ve long since forgotten the name of. The goal was to make slideshows of photographs of us, showing our class a little bit about our favorite things to do and what our lives at home were like. I took this idea and ran with it for as far as I could. I would go home every day, plonk myself down in front of the kitchen computer, and scour my family’s newly digitized photo library, creating slideshow upon slideshow for family trips, important dates like birthdays and anniversaries, and more. There was something so engaging about putting together photos in a particular order and choosing music to fit over the top of them—it was like a personal game that only I could complete with the photos and memories I had.
I see Wordwall in this same way. A student can just as easily create a Wordwall artifact as a teacher can, and this in and of itself gives me such excitement about what type of learning Wordwall can provide students. I can see students taking the site and running with it on their own, creating quizzes for their favorite TV shows or Netflix movies, creating random spinning wheels to decide where their family should eat on a given night, and even searching out other educational content on the site because of the gameified nature of the activities. I can see teachers using student-made artifacts in their own classes, crediting the students and expressing pride in their addition to the lesson, even getting ideas about how they can better utilize their own Wordwall skills in their other classes. Wordwall seems to be something far greater than the sum of its parts: a service so accessible and easy to use that students and teachers can both collaborate on online learning as one force.
As educators, it is always a boon to our teaching when our students can get more involved in their own learning. Teachers and students using the Wordwall service in similar yet substantially different ways meets ISTE Standard 3 for Students, particularly subsections 3a, 3c, and 3d for self-directed research, curating and developing their own educational artifacts, and pursuing answers to their questions through technological resources.