Classkick + Manipulatives = Winning

I've written about Classkick for practicing skills, fostering collaboration, and differentiating instruction. If you haven't tried Classkick, here are the basics: You create assignment slides and students work on them. You can see work, and offer feedback, in real time. Students can also offer anonymous assistance to each other. Classkick offers an iOS app and also a browser-based tool. No matter which way I use it, I always love it! Last week, I tried it in a new way, to support work with manipulatives. True to form, Classkick exceeded my expectations again.

I wanted to create an assignment where I could monitor student progress as they built models atoms and molecules with little velcro balls called Bunchems. I started by uploading a PDF to Classkick. The PDF was made of images from slides I created to help students understand the differences between elements, compounds, and mixtures on a particle level. Between content slides, I created assignment slides where students would have to build something and take a picture of it with the iPad. Then upload the image for feedback. In the images below, you can see the "Good work" sticker that tells a student that she completed the task correctly and, in the second, my green helping text that seeks to redirect.

With Classkick, I could easily respond to each student as s/he built a model. The feedback inspired conversations at tables where students worked together. "How did you represent this one?" "Why is that better than what I did?" "Is there another way we could build this?" The conversations were even better than the activity itself.

As always, I love how I can look at the whole class view pictured below. All of the work is captured and saved, so I can return to this assignment to study misconceptions and create my next instructional steps. 

I loved how all the work they did was recorded. With manipulatives, once you take them apart and move on to the task, the work is gone. With Classkick, students can return to this assignment and study the pictures or revisit their ideas. 

Whether or not you use manipulatives and models, I recommend Classkick for your short list of apps to try this school year. With so many great options, it will likely fit whatever lessons you can think of. As kids draw, write, and insert images, they will work collaboratively and you save all the data. You can grade assignments within the tool, too. With so many good features, Classkick always feels like a win.