However, there are probably areas you haven’t explored or are wondering if there’s a better way to do something in Legends of Learning. We’re excited to share our top 10 tips and tricks that will either open your eyes to new things or help streamline processes that you’re already doing.

Top 10 Tips and Tricks for Teachers Using Legends of Learning

1. Archiving past students — To start the year with a clean slate, you can archive your past students and groups. Don’t worry, you can always restore past students and groups if needed later too. 

2. Adding new students — Ready to add your new students to the Learning Universe? There are a few different ways to do this: 

• Students can create their own usernames when signing up to join an assignment that you have assigned. You can send them a direct link from the assignment you have created.
• You can import students from your Google Classroom.
• You can add students manually, with the “+ Student” button.
• For teachers at partner schools and districts, your account may also be set up with a rostering integration through Canvas, Classlink, or Schoology.

3. Find the right games for your assignments by using filters — We have over 2,000 games in the Learning Universe, so we understand that it can be kind of overwhelming to find the right ones for your students. However, utilizing our filters can narrow your search easily. We recommend trying three of our filters first — grade level, iPad compatibility, and Spanish availability. You may not need the last two filters, but these specifics will help to pinpoint the games you may need for your students. 

4. Add games to draft assignments — We’ve heard your feedback on this process and we’ve improved it. When you’ve found a game, you can add this game to your existing draft assignment and you can review and modify these activities in your assignment before you assign it out to students. 

5. Assigning Awakening focus areas — You can assign different focus areas for students in Awakening based on the lessons you are teaching. Your students can still have fun and explore the wide world of Awakening while learning the concepts you set. 

6. Adding videos to assignments — Along with the games and assessments in your assignments, you can add videos from Vimeo and YouTube too. Use the videos as a pre-teaching tool before students play a game! Your students can have a truly interactive, multi-media experience inside Legends of Learning. 

7. Ensure students have unnecessary tabs closed — Are your students complaining that things are taking too long to load on Legends of Learning? Or are school devices letting you down? Encourage your students to close the other tabs they may have open outside of Legends of Learning. This should free up some bandwidth to speed things up. 

8. Getting access to support when and where you need it — Do you have any questions, experiencing any technical issues, or want to pass along feedback to our team? You can always reach out to our best-in-class support team. You can email us at support@legendsoflearning.com, chat with us at the icon in the bottom right of your screen, or take a look at our Knowledge Base to see if we may have answered your question there. Also, if you’re wondering if Legends of Learning is currently having technical issues you can take a look at our status page — https://status.legendsoflearning.com/

9. Rate and review our games — We are always releasing new games, updating games, and removing those that are outdated or underperforming. Whether it’s 1 star or 5 stars, we rely on your feedback on these games to keep improving!

10. Create your own teacher avatar — You can create your very own teacher avatar in Awakening. You can express your individuality while in the town just like your students — Students aren’t the only ones that can have fun!

As Legends of Learning evolves daily, we encourage you to explore, implement, and share feedback with us, so we can continue building something that only continues your heroic journey as an educator. We hope that these top 10 tips and tricks offer an insider look into how you can navigate our legendary learning universe.

Sign into your account below to get started! 

The post Top 10 Tips and Tricks for Teachers Using Legends of Learning appeared first on Legends of Learning.

As a company very much by teachers, for teachers (30% of our team came from the classroom!), we know how strenuous and time-consuming lesson planning can be. It’s for that reason that Legends of Learning offers complete lesson plans to its premium teacher, school, and district accounts. 

5E Lesson Plans

Legends of Learning offers a 5E lesson plan for most math and science topics available on our platform. Our lesson plans follow the 5E Method–meaning they each have a section that guides students to engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate. This model has been an educational tool to help students express and approach new subject matter with curiosity; from which they’ll connect new material with their experiences.

How this translates to our lesson plans is that we provide: 

• Guided discussion questions and teacher prompts for the total class
• In-class activities or experiments
• Handouts, lab sheets, and activity sheets (with answer keys)

…and of course Legends of Learning games.

How to use Legends of Learning’s Lesson Plans

While many of you have a pre-set district-provided curriculum to follow, there may be units that lack hands-on, engaging resources for your students. Or perhaps you have already used the curriculum provided for you, but you’ve found that students are still struggling to grasp the concepts. Rather than reinventing the wheel and spending hours planning additional lessons, head to Legends of Learning and pull up one of our comprehensive lesson plans that require little to no prep work.

For upgraded, premium accounts, start with the Lesson Plan before you pick a Legends game. Since our lesson plans are split into different sections based on the 5E model, you can pick and choose which portions of the lesson you’d like to use with your students. No time for the video and discussion component provided in the Elaborate section of a lesson? No problem! Pick the portions of any lesson that are relevant for your needs and then add a game per the prompts in the lesson plan. 

Pro tip: these lessons are perfect for substitute teachers. As they provide step-by-step instruction for in-classroom discussions and activities and go hand-in-hand with Legends’ content which are already standard-aligned, you’ll be reassured that whoever steps in for your class has some assistance in teaching your class the matter at hand. 

How to access Legends of Learning’s Lesson Plans

To browse our lesson plan library, select Lesson Plans from the navigation menu in your Legends of Learning teacher page.

From here, search for a topic by keyword, or filter the list by standard code.

The search results will show all lessons aligned to that topic or standard. Narrow down the results even further by selecting the grade band and/or subject. Click the purple View icon to open the lesson…and voila! We weren’t kidding when we said lesson plans could be done in three clicks! 

Check out some Legends of Learning most popular lesson plans!

Here’s a quick sample of what our lesson plans look like:

• Math lesson plan
• Science lesson plan
• Seasons Change: Autumn Lesson Plan
• Our Solar System Lesson Plan
• The Sun, Moon, and Stars Lesson Plan
• Weather Prediction Lesson Plan
• Lunar Phases Lesson Plan
• Lesson Plan: Eclipses and Seasons

Go beyond the ordinary with Legends of Learning’s premium accounts. Elevate your instruction with access to a complete library of 5E lesson plans, powerful reporting tools, seamless grade pass-back to various LMS platforms, and Math Basecamp, our innovative math fluency program. These are just a few ways Legends is empowering teachers and students to reach their full potential!

Learn more about our premium plans here.

The post Lesson Plans: Three Clicks and Done! appeared first on Legends of Learning.

CONTENT AND CREATING ASSIGNMENTS

THEN:

Teachers who used Legends in the early days may remember only middle school science content available. Assignments basically had to be made in “real-time”–meaning they had to be created, assigned and played all within a max of 60 minutes or the assignment would end and kick students out. Further, once an assignment was published, there was no going back to edit it.

NOW:

Now teachers can have saved drafts and queued assignments, edit or duplicate an assignment, try an assignment as student and share an assignment with a co-teacher so they can plan as needed before pushing games out. Assignment length, once at 60 minutes access, can now be set at six months, if teachers wanted to! Several years later, Legends now offers thousands of games covering over 500 topics aligned to over 21 national and state standards in both math and science topics. Made for students in both elementary and middle school, more than half the games are now available with Spanish translation. In addition to games the platform offers hundreds of Phet simulations and a new fluency program launching this fall, called Math Basecamp! 

STUDENTS’ LEGENDS USAGE 

Joining an assignment

THEN:

Students used to join assignments with a unique playlist code for each new teacher assignment which added steps, time and frustration when joining an assignment. 

NOW:

Now students get rostered to their teacher’s account and see available assignments whenever they log in, making access much easier, smoother and faster!

Playing games

THEN:

Teachers would select games based on brief description only, and students would join a game with little to no instructions on how to play the game. There was still the ability to skip through a game for a student if trouble arose.

NOW:

Teachers can now preview game play via video or trial-play games, as well! Teachers have game instructions available to them on the game preview, which are also given to students when they start playing the game. 

Beyond just playing the game itself, Legends now offers text-to-speech to provide a more equitable playing environment, as well as save-progress states for a good portion of the game portal so that students don’t have to repeat playing through a game if connection is lost or class time ends. 

GENERAL USABILITY

Over the years, we’ve been focused on making the platform a more rigorous and easier platform to use. Compared to the early days, teachers and students find that our games now load at near “lightning-speeds.” Game content is more aligned to the targeted age group, both in terms of the standard-aligned content, as well as the game context and mechanics. Bonus: teachers can earn a cape or other great prizes, just for using the platform!

The experience for premium users is even better. Upgraded schools and districts have access to a wide range of Lesson Plans that are active, engaging, and integrate games, including 5E plans for science. They can also unlock full reporting data at the student and total class level. Teachers love seeing the specific questions asked and evaluating how the overall class performed to make decisions on future tasks and assignments…not to mention passing grades back via LMS! (It probably goes without saying that the early platform did not have any LMS integration capabilities.)

Lastly as the cherry on top for premium users, they have unlimited access to Legends. Uncapped playtime, unlimited simultaneous assignments, multiple learning objectives within one assignment (think review assignments!), as well as the comprehensive reporting as mentioned earlier.

Reach out to heroes@legendsoflearning.com to learn more about using research-based, game instruction in your classroom!

…and more importantly, thank you to the teachers, administrators and students who have been part of our journey. We look forward to continuing on this adventure with you!

*Legends of Learning has permission to use these student / classroom photos.

The post A Legendary Five-Year Glow Up! appeared first on Legends of Learning.

When asked about how our power users get the most out of using Legends of Learning, it definitely comes down to reporting. Legends of Learning offers a variety of data from individual assignment, student-level data, standards mastery data, and more! 

Here’s an overview of the various data reports that are available when your students play Legends of Learning quiz games and assessments.

Assignment Data

Track student progress through your live and completed assignments. With assignment data reports, you receive up to date information on exactly where students are in your assignment, how much time they spent on each activity in the assignment, as well as an overall class report that allows you to view grades for the entire assignment or each assessment or quiz game that you included. For more information on the type of data you can receive on your assignment data page, check out this article.

Reports By Student

Student reports allow you to see how each student has performed on all assignments assigned in Legends of Learning. Receive a score for each assignment (if a quiz game or assessment was added), as well as their cumulative data for all assignments completed. Additionally, you can click the assignment name from this page to take you to the whole class assignment data page. See more details on student reports here.

Standards-based Data

Pull data on how well your students are mastering each standard assigned in Legends of Learning. This page breaks down both usage (number of hours and activities) as well as performance per standard assigned…even if the standards are covered across multiple assignments! Find out if students are identified as “in progress”, “needs improvement” or “proficient” in each standard. For a more detailed look at our standards-based data and how proficiency is measured, check out this article.

Awakening Data

In addition to all the data you can receive about the assignments you have assigned, you can also monitor student progression through our independent student game, Awakening. When students enter Awakening outside of a teacher assignment, they are taken through a progression of predetermined topics in math or science. As their teacher, you can monitor where they are in this progression to identify which students may be performing below, at, or above grade level. You can find Awakening progression data in the same place as the standards-based data reports. You’ll simply toggle to the Progression section on this page.

Bonus Pro Tip

Want to see how your students performed on a topic throughout a lesson? Create your assignment with assessment questions at the beginning and at the end of the assignment. That way, you can compare their scores and evaluate their knowledge gain!

You’ll most likely start an assignment by adding games. That’s perfect. Add your games and then add in two assesssments. Finish by dragging one to the beginning of the queue.

The post Reporting on Student Performance appeared first on Legends of Learning.

It’s easy to use Legends of Learning’s new

But beyond an on-topic video, did you know there’s even more you can do with this feature?

Here are five ways to integrate videos into your Legends of Learning assignment:

1. Mini-Lesson Introduction – Record yourself giving a mini-lesson as an introduction to the topic. Then, have students play an instructional game to extend their learning and apply their knowledge.

2. Remote Demonstrations – Have students complete a Legends of Learning instructional game to build background knowledge on the topic. Then, include a video recording of a teacher-led experiment that applies what they learned in the game. End the assignment with a custom assessment to the students on their findings. 

3. Homework or Asynchronous Lessons – Found a great video that you want students to watch on their own time? Include the video in a Legends of Learning assignment. Then, create a custom assessment to ask students questions about the video they watched.

4. Extending Viewing – Have a long video for students to watch? Break up the YouTube video into separate segments with a Legends of Learning game between segments. Simply save the video as different time stamped sections and include each segment in the assignment. (Reminder: this can only be done with YouTube videos and not with Vimeo.)

5. Game Previews – Include the game preview video, when available, before a game in your assignment. This will give students a sneak peak into the game before playing it themselves and provide additional context to the game instructions for better playing and learning.

Do this in a few easy steps:

• Open the game information and select “Watch Preview”
• In the video viewer, click on “Copy link” in the upper right hand corner
• Go back to the assignment and add video. Paste that copied link when prompted.
• .  Ta da! The preview video is now part of the assignment.

The post There’s More to Video Than Meets the Eye 👀 appeared first on Legends of Learning.

Utilize student groups for differentiated learning between your classes as well as individualize instruction for students by: 

• class period
• for remediation, intervention, or enrichment groups
• after school groups
• ESL students

The first step is to create groups in your Legends of Learning account. You can import your groups from Google Classroom (or another rostering integration) as well as create your own smaller groups as needed. Here is more information on how to create groups in your Legends of Learning account.

After creating groups, you’ll want to tag students to the appropriate group(s). You can add students to groups individually, or select multiple students to add to a group at once. Need help adding students to groups? Check out this article with more information.

Once your groups are set up with students, it’s time to assign your first assignment! After creating an assignment, you’ll have the option to select the group(s) that you want to see this assignment. You can select multiple groups to see the same assignment, or assign differentiated work to individual groups.

Wondering what to do if a student cannot access an assignment that you’ve assigned to a specific group? Your first step is to check that the username the student is signing in with is tagged to the group assigned. If not, you’ll need to add that student to the group in order for them to access the assignment. For more information, check out this article.

The post Create Student Groups for Differentiated Learning appeared first on Legends of Learning.

• SEARCH FILTERS – Search for a topic and use the available filters. Simply turn the iPad filter on to display only games that are compatible with iPads.

• INDIVIDUAL GAME INFORMATION – Every game provides additional information when you click the game tile. Look for the iPad icon on the game tile to ensure you are assigning a game that is iPad compatible.

Pro Tip – Filters are not available when creating an assignment. Be sure to check out the game tile and look for the iPad icon for any additional game you want to add to an assignment!

Need more information on our iPad compatibility? Check out this article for more!

The post How-to Find iPad Compatible Games appeared first on Legends of Learning.

All assignments are free to use and are aligned to Common Core, NGSS, or other standardized state curriculum. These assignments incorporate game-based learning practices, so they incorporate instructional video games and quizzes and have been created by teachers just like you!

To get started:

1. Find the subject and grade you’re teaching from the relevant Google spreadsheet below

2. Search for the standard ID or name and click the link to view the assignment

3. Current users will need to login, new users will need to create an account and add their students

4. From there, you can edit the assignment as you wish, or decide to push the assignment to your class, exactly how it is

**Pro tip: be sure to bookmark this spreadsheet as we’ll be continuing to update it with more assignments!

Math Assignments:

Elementary School:

• Common Core Elementary School Math Assignments
• Florida Math Elementary School Math Assignments
• Texas TEKS Elementary School Math Assignments
• Virginia SOL Elementary School Math Assignments

Middle School:

• Common Core Middle School Math Assignments
• Florida Math Middle School Math Assignments
• Texas TEKS Middle School Math Assignments
• Virginia SOL Middle School Math Assignments

Science Assignments:

Elementary School:

• NGSS Elementary School Science Assignments
• Florida NGSSS Elementary School Science Assignments
• Texas TEKS Elementary School Science Assignments
• Virginia SOL Elementary School Science Assignments

Middle School:

• NGSS Middle School Science Assignments
• Florida NGSSS Middle School Science Assignments
• Texas TEKS Middle School Science Assignments
• Virginia SOL Middle School Science Assignments

Not sure how to use Legends of Learning assignments?

Here’s how teachers across the country use Legends of Learning games and quizzes:

• As a bell ringer
• To assist lagging students
• For early finishers
• As a solution for differentiated learning
• To help with IEPs
• Within a station rotation
• To introduce a topic
• To reinforce a topic
• To review a topic
• For ELL students

Learn more about Legends of Learning’s game based learning approach.

The post Math and Science Assignments: NGSS, Common Core, FL, TX TEKS, VA SOL appeared first on Legends of Learning.

1. Deploy Legends of Learning Question Games

The Legends of Learning Platform allows teachers to better find the specific type of content they prefer. Question games, ideal for testing knowledge, are marked with the letter Q. Instructional games, which help students achieve content mastery, are denoted by the letter I. So if you want a Question game, simply find the topic you will be teaching in our system and look for the Q games.

You’ll notice that games are rated by both teachers and students to help you find the best game possible, based on quality of instruction and how much fun they are for students. Also, teacher reviews offer further insights on how best to use the games. You can offer your students multiple Q games in a single playlist (tips on building playlists here).

2. Create an Earth Day Quiz via the Assessments Feature

If you prefer to complement games with an Earth Day quiz, or you don’t want to launch a game at all, you can use our assessments feature. Assessments let you add a specific number of questions as an exercise for students. The questions are drawn from our teacher-vetted library of assessment items, aligned to standard science curricula like NGSS, GSE, SOL, and TEKS.

You can add assessments either as a standalone playlist, before or after a game, or between games. Afterward, you can view student performance data (and download it as a spreadsheet) by clicking the “Question Data” button. You can also see individual student and class-wide answers while the playlist is live, which lets you adapt your class time based on real-time performance.

Also, make sure to check out our mega-resource guide with more than 150 Earth Day activities, games, ideas, and lesson plans.

The post How to Deploy an Earth Day Quiz appeared first on Legends of Learning.

While most of our games are gated and require a free teacher account to play, Earth Day represents a pivotal time of year in the science classroom.

As spring makes its way into our lives, students start to spend a lot more time outside after a long winter. With so much media focused on Earth Day itself, the combination creates the perfect opportunity to engage students with earth science, as well as crosscutting concepts in life and physical sciences. Plus, let’s be fair, it’s one of the last lessons of the school year before most teachers go into test preparation and final exams.

So while we have literally hundreds of games about Earth Day-related topics, we thought it made sense to offer some openly available game-based learning content. Our goal is to help teachers and parents discussing Earth Day with their students to better enjoy this teaching moment. The games were selected by some of our teacher ambassadors, two of whom also created lesson plans published on our Earth Day Activities and Ideas website.

By the way, the Activities and Ideas page also provides access to more than 130 STEM activities and projects that you can engage in this Earth Day. So yeah, we want students to have a memorable, meaningful Earth Day experience. Our games are just part of that blended lesson plan.

Of course, we hope teachers will like the science games, too, and give them a try for their other lessons and test preparation. A legendary win-win!

Regardless, check out our 6 Free Online Earth Day Games here.

The post Why We Published<BR> 6 Free Earth Day Games appeared first on Legends of Learning.