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Design Process Students play Twister to practice getting back up when they fall.
The Research
It was obvious that my students needed emotional support in order to be successful in their work and while testing. A portion of my Driving Question Analysis: Sociocultural: Students come into the classroom with a varying amount of emotional baggage. They often do not know how to face these complex feelings and still complete work at school. Teachers may struggle to support students who have a difficult time learning in classrooms. Many teachers would prefer to stick to academic subjects when engaging in direct instruction. However, teachers are responsible for teaching the whole student in areas that arise at school. Feelings of being overwhelmed, low-self esteem, and stress often surface in the classroom. Technical: This semester we are using Classcraft to positively reinforce the usage of calming strategies during the school day. Additionally students will use Google forms to track their stress levels after tests. Most students have gaming devices, smart phones, or tablets at home. In the classroom we have 1:1 chromebooks. The most popular games that they play are Fortnight, Roblox, and Minecraft.They really enjoy playing Prodigy Math Game which incorporates role playing and math skills. I believe the students should have an easy time transitioning some of the role plying skills from Prodigy over to Classcraft. I will introduce Classcraft when we return from Spring Break on April 9. Students will be positively reinforced for using positive mindset in the classroom and rewarded points on Classcraft. Over two days in the classroom the students explored Classcraft. Students logged in, created, characters, and began filling the various roles necessary to complete quests in this alternate reality game. While the students were excited to gamify their points in a new way, I usually use Class Dojo, they found the website difficult to maneuver. This lead to many frustrating feelings. The website ultimately required too much setup time on the teacher interface. Informational: By positively reinforcing skills such as taking a deep breath when engaged in a difficult task. While teachers instruct students how to do math and read they also have a gap to fill in the emotional growth that is necessary for young students.  Taking a selfie to teach students about social media.
The Website
After exploring capstone websites from previous cohorts I could see the many different ways that I could present my own. Personally I have a tough time sifting through text heavy pages. I really tried my best to keep lengthy paragraphs to a minimum (they ended up being a necessary evil) in favor of links to more information and bullet points where appropriate. The Logo My first logo attempt from Logojoy was a good place to get my feet wet. The site was simple and gave options around a few criteria that you were able to manipulate. But the logo didn't speak to me or really relate to my capstone in any way. The black and white contrast was too severe in relation to my calm and focused research. My next attempt was through Canva. Much like Logojoy, the site was easy to navigate. Canva offered a wide variety of editable templates. I chose a template with a chilling blue background and a light grey border. The hexagonal border may seem like a random choice, or something trendy. However, the hexagon often symbolizes harmony and balance in the yoga world. Having one to outline the words helped center and focus the words. But when I added more concentric hexagons, following the advice of my cohort, it reminded me of how our lungs expand when we breathe.
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Research
Support and Next Steps
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