5 Steps to Gamify Your Elementary Classroom
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Release Date: 01/31/2020
11 Books for Your Teacher Summer: AI, Faith & Focus — Episode 949
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Summer reading for teachers — 11 books I've highlighted over 6,800 times and keep coming back to. This Significant Saturday special is my personal summer list for educators and lifelong learners, spanning AI ethics, productivity, faith, and the classroom-management classics I hand every first-year teacher. In this episode, you'll learn: Why The Age of AI by Jason Thacker belongs at the top of a Christian educator's list The one big-picture idea from The Future Is Faster Than You Think that brings hope about technology Which books to reach for when you're feeling burned out or overwhelmed...
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AI Tools Inside Adobe Express and Canva for Teachers — Episode 948
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Adobe Express and Canva are packed with AI tools that save teachers hours — Amy Storer shares the features her teachers love most. Innovative learning specialist Amy Storer (Montgomery ISD, TX) walks through the AI-powered tools inside Adobe Express and Canva that teachers and students are getting most excited about — from studio-style student podcasts to interactive games you can build without writing a line of code. She also shares a favorite bonus tool for creating step-by-step how-to guides, and closes with a word of encouragement for any teacher feeling buried by "all the things." In...
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Teacher Burnout: How to Reconnect and Feel Fulfilled — Episode 947
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Teacher burnout isn't weakness — it's disconnection. Michelle Singh shares how teachers can reconnect, set boundaries, and feel fulfilled again. Michelle Singh — National Board Certified Teacher, founder of The Restful Teacher, and CEO of LCT-E Learning Solutions — spent more than 20 years in the classroom and district leadership before her own burnout forced a change. In this honest conversation with Vicki Davis, she offers teachers a path back to the work they love. In this episode, you'll learn: Why teacher disengagement is an "iceberg" with far more below the surface How to serve...
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A Real Teacher Sparking Curiosity Makes All the Difference — Episode 946
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Why do we have to prove we're human in the age of AI? STEM educator and AI coach Brandie Wright shares the real story behind her ISTE main-stage talk on sparking curiosity — and why the presence of a teacher still matters. When Vicki first heard Brandie's story on the ISTE main stage, she wasn't sure the student was real — that's how believable AI-generated stories have become. This Wonderful Classroom Wednesday conversation is about curiosity, human connection, and the artisanship of teaching in an age when a kid alone with a screen simply isn't enough. In this episode, you'll learn: How...
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AI Assisted Grading: A Teacher's 30-Second Checklist — Episode 945
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Steve Swanson built an AI grading tool — and then deleted the feature that would have returned AI-generated grades straight to students. He's a high school engineering teacher who was staring down 150 assignments after a field-trip week, and he built ClassLens because he needed it for his own gradebook. But when he got to the point where he could push one button and have everything graded and sent back automatically, it felt wrong. So he took the button out. In this Tech Tip Tuesday conversation, Steve makes the case for "human in the loop" — not as a buzzword, but as the actual job of...
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Habits of Hope to Help Educators with Dr. Julia Garcia
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Hope isn't just a feeling — it's a practice you can build. Psychologist and author Dr. Julia Garcia (The 5 Habits of Hope) joins Vicki Davis to redefine hope as something educators can practice, even in the hardest seasons. Recorded shortly after Vicki lost her father, this is an honest, encouraging conversation about hopelessness, grief, and the small habits that help us hold on to hope. In this episode, you'll learn: Why we experience hope as a feeling — and how to practice it instead The habit of reflection: pausing long enough to connect with something real The habit of receiving:...
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How Students Actually Learn: Memory & Attention
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
How do students actually learn? AP Psychology teacher Blake Harvard — The Effortful Educator — shares the cognitive science of attention and memory that every K-12 teacher can use tomorrow. In this episode of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast, Vicki Davis talks with Blake Harvard about why attention is a necessary component of learning, the simple pre-test that primes the brain, and the mistake of making hard content even harder. Blake breaks down the two strategies with more than a century of research behind them — retrieval practice and spaced practice — and why rereading notes just...
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Experiential Learning Through Travel That Sticks
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Experiential learning through travel changes students for good — and Denver science and CTE teacher Angela Cannava proves any teacher can lead it. In this episode of the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast, Angela shares how curriculum-aligned international trips with EF Explore America transformed her students: a forensics lab in Great Britain where they did real DNA fingerprinting, and a Belize Ridge-to-Reef conservation expedition with a midnight bat workshop. She tells the story of a student who barely spoke in three years coming home changed, and a Belize traveler now headed back to work at the...
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AI Art in the Classroom with Tim Needles
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Art teacher Tim Needles brings AI art into the classroom without losing the watercolors, clay, and joy of real art. In this Tech Tool Tuesday, Tim shares how he uses Adobe Express and text-to-image to amplify student imagination, why the kids who use AI well are simply more descriptive, and the daily 10-minute creativity habit that helps teachers fight burnout. Plus: the legacy mural project that reaches a whole community, and the student who broke INTO the art room to keep working — and now works at Industrial Light & Magic. In this episode, you'll learn: How to bring AI art into any...
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Vibe Coding for Teachers: No Coding Skills Needed
10 Minute Teacher Podcast with Cool Cat Teacher
Vibe coding for teachers means describing what you want in plain English and letting AI write the code — no coding background required. 2021 Kentucky Teacher of the Year Donnie Piercey joins Vicki Davis to show how any teacher can build custom classroom tools that save real time. Donnie shares the small-problem-first method he used to build printable daily student task lists, auto-translate his classroom newsletter into five languages, and create self-checking games — plus the dead-simple troubleshooting trick of screenshotting the error and pasting it back to the AI. Vicki shares how she...
info_outlineHow could you take your whole elementary classroom year and gamify it? What if everything students learn could gain them XP (experience points?) What if you can reach those strugglers by making a classroom on mission? Today, Heather Marrs, a teacher and instructional coach from Oregon, takes us through the five steps she used to gamify her elementary classroom and give us the tips and tricks she learned to motivate every learner.
Heather Marrs - Bio As submitted
Heather Marrs is an Instructional Coach at Eagle Rock Elementary in Eagle Point, Oregon. She is an Apple Distinguished Educator, Seesaw Ambassador, Book Creator Ambassador and FlipGrid Ambassador. Heather is passionate about integrating technology in education to amplify student voice, increase communication, and engage students. She has been a presenter at ISTE 2019, NCCE 2016-19, the Southern Oregon EdTech Summit 2015-18, and IntegratED 2017-18. Heather is the founder and main moderator of the Oregon EdChat which can be found at #OrEdChat on Twitter. She enjoys being a connected educator and providing professional development both locally and regionally. Outside of teaching, she is a wife and mother of two amazing kiddos.
Blog: https://hmarrs24.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @hmarrs24
Resource: I've created a Google site that accompanies a three-day workshop that I do on gamifying your classroom at the elementary level. It's called Next Level Gamification: https://sites.google.com/eaglepnt.k12.or.us/nextlevelgamification3day/home