Classcraft and Spiral: Entertaining but useful education apps
Why do we remember fables and fairy tales? It’s because the lessons are packaged as interesting stories. For the same reason, kids bad at Math somehow play checkers and Uno quite well, because it does not occur to them as solving problems, they are busy with a game. Two trending apps are using a heavy dose of entertainment to make learning more attractive. Both apps can be used as part of Google Classroom. With so many schools using Google Classroom on a daily basis since the lockdown, the popularity of the apps have skyrocketed.
Classcraft
Classcraft is a fun and engaging collaborative educational tool that works through role-playing for students and teachers. The fun part is students can ‘become’ intriguing characters: Guardians, Healers, and Mages. In the process, Classcraft creates digital communities in the remote-learning environment and keeps students and teachers motivated. Teachers can set group expectations challenging the student team, who stay engaged just to win! Some of these challenges include:
- Being on time for class
- Participating actively in forums and discussions
- Submitting assignments on time
- Setting learning goals and achieving them
Students can use Classcraft’s messaging feature to stay connected with friends and teachers. Teachers have been using this feature to send encouragement, answer questions, reminders for class and assignments, and monitor student progress.
Spiral
Spiral is, to put it in one line, a collaboration between collaboration tools. It is a one-stop shop for popular assessment apps where students can engage with everyday learning activities. It’s also a stand-alone app, so there’s no binding to integrate it in the school LMS, but most schools do it anyway for the sake of convenience.
Spiral has 5 key activities to keep the students engaged:
- Quickfire lite for asking questions and receiving quick responses from students
- Quickfire for joining quizzes with multiple format responses
- Discuss for turning a presentation into a discussion thread for the whole class
- Team Up for enabling students to collaborate, create, and share presentations
- Clip for converting a video into a quiz with live chat
Spiral doesn’t need any installation and can be accessed with a code, link, or an email invitation by the teachers.