Bitsboard and Sight Words

Trace It Game

During my student teaching last year, Sight Words was one of my favorite apps to use with my students! Sight Words is the most basic Bitsboard app and is designed for students from preschool to third grade. Bitsboard also makes similar apps for different grades and subjects. The main focus of the app is to help students learn sight words or vocabulary words in a fun and engaging way. 

The app is very simple to use and navigate through. When the app is opened, the user chooses an account to use. Accounts are free and can be set up for each student or the user can proceed as a guest. The advantage to creating accounts for each student is that the teacher can go into the app and check student progress. 

Once in the app, select which grade or group of words to use in the games. Each list  has about 20 sight words on it. This list can be narrowed down by going into the account settings and selecting which words from the list you want the student to work on. Students then choose what game they want to play to practice their sight words (these games can also be limited by the teacher). Possible games include photo touch, match up, trace it, unscramble, missing item, word search, crosswords, and more! Each game works on the spelling and recognition of the words as well as the pronunciation and picture association. In the games, words are in a random order to increase learning and decrease memorization of the order so students have to actually learn the words to do well. At the end of each game, students will be given a score which can be recorded by teachers to determine the success and learning of the given words. 

Teachers can also use the Review Game to quiz students. Words will pop up on the screen one at a time. The student reads/says the word out loud. After reading the word, the teacher/student can hit "Tap to see answer" and the app will read the word. A bar at the bottom will then pop up and ask "How well did you know this" with color coded answers: red- not well, yellow- somewhat, green- very well. Once all of the words have been assessed, The app will tell you the percent correct (yellow and green), the percent known (green), as well as a list of all of the words given and the score given. Teachers can also compare these scores to all of the past scores to see the progress being made. 

Use in classroom

My student teaching was in a special education resource classroom for Kindergarten through third grade. I mainly used the app with my K-1 students and one second grade student. My students loved using the app! It was a great tool to have them practice as I worked one- on -one with other students. It was also a great way to keep them engaged and actually interested in studying sight words. My cooperating teacher and I were able to see huge results from before using the app to the end of my student teaching with all of our students. The three students I had using it most all loved the Trace It Game. I eventually had to tell them that they could only play it once every 5 games!

SAMR

This app can be used in many different ways in the classroom. In my classroom last year, I was mainly using this technology as an augmentation. All of the uses for the app, I could have done paper pencil or with physical flash cards. The app however allows for all of the games and tools I may have been using with my students into one place as well as keep data for me in the same place.