Have you heard of the Word Masters program?

I was introduced to this program a few years ago by Joanne Kyle (Whitewater Middle School). This was an opportunity that she offered to her advanced middle school students.  It is a competition/challenge that happens three times a year. Students are given lists of words to get to know well. For the challenges, the words are used in deeper-level thinking analogies.  Local high scorers receive a medal and top scores are also sent on to the national level.

This program is especially useful because it can be used as a pre-packaged enrichment opportunity for students.  In addition, there are two levels of competition: blue (regular) and gold (advanced), thus making it easy to choose the right level of challenge.

In my district, we’ve taken this a step farther to make it a true extension activity:  Students study nuances of the words and the root words behind them so that they have a broader knowledge base that can be called on in the future, and with similar words.  When competitions come around, scores have been higher than we’d expect, and there is a lot of buy-in from students.

Word Masters is not free, but the pricing structure can be found on their website at https://www.wordmasterschallenge.com/.

Stacci Barganz
WATG Board Member

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This month’s Tools You Can Use focuses on riddles put forth by TED-Ed. This blog post features five logic puzzles that will help students practice the Mathematical Practice Standards.  All five are highly engaging for students in about 2nd grade or higher, leaving them begging for more.

The blog post is located at https://blog.ed.ted.com/2016/02/02/can-you-solve-these-5-ted-ed-riddles/ ​

​This month's technology tool will help those of you who are hands-on with students, and is designed to make watching educational videos interactive.  It's called EdPuzzle, and it will take a video from YouTube, National Geographic, Khan Academy, etc. and let you get rid of all the advertisements, add in questions, and ensure that students don't skip parts of the video.  Students can then watch it on their own (at home or in school) and respond, and you can see their answers.  What a great direct instruction/formative assessment tool!

The neat thing is that you can use your school Gmail (Google) account to log in, so you don't even need to remember a new username and password. In addition, if you use Google Classroom, it will let you "plunk" your EdPuzzle video directly into any Google Classroom you have without extra steps!

If you'd like to see a video tutorial, you can view that at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibRw6TR9iV8.  

EdPuzzle itself can be found at https://edpuzzle.com/.

Contributed by by Heidi Erstad, WATG Board member
PERTS is an applied research center based out of Stanford University. The center has developed a free, evidence-based program designed to increase ninth graders' engagement, motivation, and ultimately success by laying the foundation for a growth mindset.

The online program delivered in two 30-minute sessions. Includes survey questions, short reading passages, and brief reflection exercises. Students will learn scientific evidence showing that the brain is malleable and specific behaviors that can rewire the brain and increase one’s intellectual abilities.

High schools can enroll in this free course at https://www.perts.net/orientation/hg to help freshmen navigate this often-fragile transition in a strengths-based way.

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This month’s featured resource comes as a result of a question posed to the WISGIFT listserv about advanced learning in the teaching of history. (Thank you to WISGIFT listserv subscriber Andrea Lorenz for this resource!)

Stanford’s History Education Group provides field-tested materials for teaching students to be critical consumers of history. Resources include:

• Reading Like a Historian curriculum, engaging students with essential historical questions and primary source documents.
• History Assessments of Thinking, over 80 assessments that measure students' historical thinking rather than recall of facts.
• Civic Online Reasoning assessments, gauging students’ ability to judge the credibility of the information that floods their smartphones, tablets, and computer screens.

A toolkit of powerful tools for extending learning and creating informed and critical-thinking adult citizens.

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This year’s WATG Conference will feature sessions around engaging student voice. This IES document offers guideline for using three tools that educators can use to gather and analyze local data to listen to students on school-related topics or problems:

• Analyzing Surveys with Kids involves students in analyzing and interpreting survey results and producing suggestions for school improvement.
• Inside-Outside Fishbowl organizes a focus group in which students and educators trade roles as speakers and listeners during a facilitated discussion and jointly develop an action plan.
• Students Studying Students’ Stories guides a digital storytelling process in which students produce and analyze videotaped interviews of other students and then host forums with educators to suggest improvements.

Download a copy of this document here

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