In this tutorial, I will highlight a website called Deck Toys. The address for it, as you can see, is decktoys. And Deck Toys is a really interesting, fairly new website that helps teachers integrate educational games into the classroom. The slogan for Deck Toys is Where students become heroes for your lesson adventures, and that's a good way to start thinking about this. You create some lesson adventures, and the students become the heroes in those adventures. They try to solve puzzles, answer questions, learn content so that they can win the adventure. Deck Toys drag and drop lesson creation. I'll show you some of what that process is like a little bit later. It also does enable you to differentiate a little bit for your students. And then finally, one of the nice things about Deck Toys is it does enable you to track students' progress in real-time so you can get some formative assessment data. You can also go back and look at a report after the fact to see how did my students do in the Deck Toys activity that they did yesterday. So let's jump

right in and take a look at Deck Toys and how you as a teacher can get started using it. Here on Deck Toys, I can log in to a pre-existing account, or I can click Teacher Sign Up, and I can sign in with a Google account. That makes it really easy, especially if that's a school or a district Google account. But even if it's not, that might work well for you. It does say for teachers only, proof may be required to prove that you're a teacher. If you're a student, you can just click Student Join Classroom, and then the students will need to put in the address that they got from their teacher. I'll show you a little bit later how a teacher can generate the information that goes here so that the students can join their classes. So give me a minute to sign into my Deck Toys account, and then I'll resume the video. Okay, so here I am in my Deck Toys account. And just so you know, the first time that you use Deck Toys, Deck Toys might invite you to create either a language arts deck or a

science deck or a history deck. Those are basically templates to help you get started using Deck Toys. But in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to build the Deck Toys deck from scratch. Here you can see a list of decks that I've used or created in the past. And then underneath that, I have highlights from the deck gallery. So, these are decks that were created by other teachers. And if I want to, I can preview them to see how good they are. I can also assign them to my students. And another option I have that's really good is I could make a copy of this deck and then adjust it and make it my own. If you want to see more than just the highlights, you can click here to go to the deck gallery. I'm gonna go back and just create my own from scratch. So, I clicked here on this plus sign and I need to name my new deck. And I'll just call this Spanish articles. I'm gonna teach the students how to say el, la, los, las, un, una, unos, which are the

Spanish equivalents of the and so I'll click OK. It created the new deck, and now I can just click OK to open the deck builder. The deck builder presents me with a completely blank deck. This is what they call a deck, and the first thing I want to do here is change the background of the deck. I want to design this the way I want it to look for my students. To do this, I just click the Edit background button in the lower left. And if you look carefully, there's a grid in the background, and I'm just gonna put things on that grid. And this is basically like setting up a board game. This is putting the board down for the students to be able to play their game on top of the board. Now I can design the background of this deck by using the tools that are here across the top. First, I have an image icon. When you click on that, you can just pick a background color if you'd like, and it changes the entire background to that color. So I'll go with a blue background. You can also

add some shapes onto the map. Here are some images that look like plots of ground, and I really like this one, so I'll click on that, and it puts it onto my deck. It's a little bit bigger than I had envisioned though, but the good news is you can just click on it, go to the corner, and shrink it down. You can also use these edge handles here to make it more narrow or more wide if you'd like. Maybe I'll go back to that add image button, and this time I'll add a different plot of ground for a different color, different shape. Now, you'll notice that Decoys reserves some of these shapes, some of these background images, it reserves them for the pro customers, people that are paying to use Decoys. That's okay though. I'll just use the free map content. So, I clicked to add this other style of ground to my deck, and I'll just put it there. Now, next to the image icon, I have a shapes icon. I could add a shape of my own, and I can change the color for this shape if I'd

like I can just click on it and then here at the left there's a delete button, duplicate order button, and what that's for is for deciding what order it should appear on the screen, what layer basically is it on, and then there's the color option. So I'll change the color, maybe I'll make it kind of yellow, and I'll just put it there. You can see there's lines and triangles, so a few shapes to work with. Next to shapes, I have some pro images. These are things like roads, signposts, place marks, and railroad tracks, things like that. So I haven't paid for the pro account, so I don't have access to these. Next to that, I have a tree symbol that gives me nature images. So I can put in some trees just to kind of decorate the deck a little bit. I can put in some palm trees, maybe the Sun. I'll put the Sun over here, maybe make that a little bit bigger. So at this point, we're just designing the game board so that the students have something interesting to

look at while they're playing the game. Maybe I'll put a mountain right there. Now next to the nature symbol, we have a rocket symbol. And when you click on that, it gives you some of the deck toys icons. These are deck toy symbols. There's also lock symbols like safes, there's signposts, keys, and other things. And again, some that are reserved for paying customers. Okay, so I'll just add this signpost here, and I'll just maybe put it right next to that. We have some letters and numbers that you can add onto your deck. You can put the letters basically one at a time into the deck. I'm not going to do that. I'm gonna delete that letter. Next to that though, we do have a text box. Instead of just putting one letter at a time, you can select the text box and just type inside the text box to add those words into your deck. I'm going to delete that. The last option we have here at the far right is image picker. If you click that, it is possible to click

access Google Drive. Once you've connected it to your Google Drive account, you'll be able to search Google images for items to add onto your deck. So, I'm gonna do a search for bridge and it found a whole bunch of bridges. The only problem with these bridges is that there are other things in the pictures other than bridges, right? I don't want the sky, I don't want the clouds. So, just a trick that you can try: if you go back to image search, what you can do is type .PNG. And if you search for bridge in this case .PNG, it gives you some bridges that don't have anything else in them, just the bridge. Now, you can see it doesn't work 100%, these images do have other items in the background, but that's okay, it found some good results for me. I'm gonna select this bridge, click select, and now I've got a nice bridge added to my deck. Okay, so now I've got a bridge. I can rotate the bridge, there's a bunch of different things I can try to

get the bridge to look the way I want it to look. Now, because of how that's set up, I might want to scoot this over just a little bit so that it looks like the students can cross this bridge to get from one island to the next. Okay, I'm pretty happy with how that looks now. Just so you know, if that doesn't work, if for some reason you're not able to go to image picker, access your Google Drive, connect your Google Drive, and then search for an image. You can also upload your image, and sometimes you can just go directly to Bing.com and do an image search. Find the image you would like to use, right-click on it, and copy the image, and then go into Deck Toys, click on your deck, and then on the keyboard, just do control V if you're on a Windows computer, on a Mac, command V. So I did that, and I clicked OK, and look, that's another way to bring in images, just copy paste. It doesn't always work as well. You can see that the white corners are

included in this image, but that is another option that it's good to know about and to be able to do. So I'm gonna delete that out. All right, let's say I'm happy with how this looks, and I am. I think that looks pretty good. It's time now for me to add some interactivity and to build the actual Deck Toys game onto this deck. So I'm gonna click save and exit background editor. I click that button, the background is set. I can adjust it if I need to. I could go back in by clicking edit background, but for now, this is perfect. I'm gonna begin. So this next step, this is how you turn this good-looking deck into an actual game or contest. And you do that by using the tools here at the right. The first tool I'm gonna use is a signpost. So I'll click on that, and I'll drag it, and I'll put it right here, and I'll call this start here. So I just clicked where it said edit title, and I'll change that to

start here. Click OK. That's the beginning. And now, if I click this little circle with the down arrow, it lets me change the color of the signpost. I can make it black, blue, green, red, whichever of these colors I want that signpost to be. I'll change it to yellow. I like that one. Next, I can click Edit activity. So, this gets me into the signpost to make some edits, and it gives me some tools. Here, I have some font tools. I even have a link tool. So, if I want to, I could make this signpost into a hyperlink. They can click on the signpost, click on the hyperlink, and go to a website. But for now, I'll just type in a message. So, there's my message. Let's learn the Spanish articles. I click save, and that's really all that those signposts do. It's a way to convey some basic information to your students. So, what do I want them to experience next after seeing that Start here, let's learn the Spanish articles? I would like my students next to be presented with those.

Spanish articles and to learn what they are. So, for that, I need to use one of these two tools here at the right. And I'm gonna start with this one. It's called slides with questions, and it says drag to map. So, I just click and drag, and I drop that somewhere on the map. It could be almost anywhere, but you'll notice as you're clicking and dragging around, you'll notice a green circle. If you see that green circle pop up, that's a legitimate place where you could put the slides with questions. So, I'll put it right there. I'll click to edit the title, and I'm gonna call this learn the articles. So, I click OK, and I'll just click that circle with the arrow. I might change the color here, but the most important thing to do next is to click Edit activity. And now I'm gonna build the experience for my students that they're gonna have that will teach them the Spanish articles. Now, even if I've already taught them the Spanish articles, this could be a review for them, or maybe this is the first time that

they've even heard about the Spanish articles, and this should look a little bit familiar if you've used PowerPoint before or Google slides. So you can see here's slide number one, and I can add more slides here, and then I change the content on the slides using this area here in the center of the screen. So here in slide one, I would like to start just with a message to my students, and I could put that message on an image. I could upload a picture and put my message on that, or I could use just a blank image, and that's what I'll do. You can also click here to just edit a question, and that becomes the text on the screen, but I'm gonna click new blank image. And now I'll click Edit slide image, and it gives me some tools to use. I'll click this text tool, and I'll just type the Spanish articles. And I just shrunk the screen a little bit so you can see that better. Are el la los los un una Uno's and Una's. Okay, so that's me.

introducing my students to the idea of Spanish articles. Now, if I click away from that text box and then click back on it, notice that I can stretch it out to make it a little bit big. And then if I wanted to, I could highlight all of the text and use these tools to center the text on the screen. I think that looks quite a bit better. Now, down below, I could explain what they all mean and I could put some more information there. So, imagine a little bit more explanation here, but for now, I'm just gonna click Save in the upper left corner to save that first slide. Now, onto slide two. Here at the left, I can click this plus sign to add slide number two. This time, instead of an image with text, I could insert media from Google Drive or a PowerPoint presentation, etc. But I think I'll just click embed site or video, and I'll paste in the link to a YouTube video. This one here on the definite and indefinite articles in Spanish. This is a good high-quality video on the articles in Spanish. So, I'll

just copy the address for it, and I'll go paste that in. Click OK. If I want to, I can change the start time, so I could have it start at 10 seconds or at one minute, and also the end time, but I'll just leave it blank. Click OK, and now my students will be able to watch this video as part of this deck. After they watch the video, they should be somewhat familiar with the Spanish articles, so I'll follow this up with a formative assessment check. I want to find out how well my students understand this information that they just barely learned. So for this, I can just click to edit a question, and I'll just type up a question here: How would you say the hats in Spanish? So that's a pretty good question. Now, notice as you're building your questions, there are equation tools, so for math teachers, there are ways you can put those in. Also, special characters, including accented letters, etc., so those are good options to have, but I'm happy with that question. I'll click Save and

now I need to put in the right answer, and if I want it to be multiple-choice, I need to put in some wrong answers too. So I want to set B to be the correct answer. So there are various ways you could say the hats, but I'll just put Lois sombreros that's the correct answer. I click Save to mark that as the correct answer. I have to click this check box, and notice that it only allows for one correct answer. I'll put in some incorrect answers here as well and click Save each time. So now you can see what the students will experience when they get to this slide activity. They'll first see the text that I wrote. Then when they're ready to move on, they'll be able to watch a YouTube video. And then when they're ready to move on again, they'll get a question. And you can see how it displays here. This will be displayed basically pretty big on the slide. And then the students will need to answer the question. I am done with this slide activity. If I wanted to

I could add more to it, but I think it's really good the way it is. So I'll back out of it by clicking that back arrow. And now I have an activity for my students to do. Now, so far, this doesn't seem much like a game, does it? It's more like a formative assessment tool. It's kind of like PowerPoint mixed with Socrative or formative, but stick with me. There are some gaming elements here, and let's look at them next. So after this Learn the Articles slide activity, I want my students to be able to practice what they've learned. So I'm dragging this third tool onto the screen. I'll just put it right there. I'll click to edit the title, and I'll call this Practice the Articles. Click OK. And then I'll click this circle with the arrow, and I'll click Edit Activity. And next, look at the variety of games or other activities I can have my students do. One is called Word Wheel. It's basically like Wheel of Fortune. There's also a Rockets

activity that's also similar. There's a sorting activity, word attack activity, drawing guest. That's kind of like a Pictionary game where one student or group of students draws a picture, and then other students have to guess what it is that they're drawing. There's a sequence activity, a deck of cards, flashcards. We've got a maze game, a memory game, a game show, but that has to be in a whole class setting. There's a pairs game, a jigsaw puzzle, a crossword puzzle. So a variety of games or puzzles or activities that your students can use to practice your content. I'm gonna cancel out of this though before I actually develop this study set game or activity. I'm actually going to jump over here to the left and click on managed study sets. If I click that, it lets me create a set of questions for my students to answer. Now sometimes Deck Toys gives you some sample study sets, and so you might see those, but if you don't, no worries. You can just go here and click the plus sign to create a

new study set now. It is possible to import a study set from Quizlet, but I want to create one from scratch. So I click new blank study set, create, and I'll call this Spanish articles. Now, some of you are thinking, Didn't we already do this? Yes, we did, but that was for the deck, and this is different. Right now, I'm creating a study set. Think of it as being a vocabulary list. So there it is. I'll click Save, and now I can start adding the words that are part of this vocabulary list. So I'll put EL, and then I'll click over here for the definition of EL. EL is a definite singular masculine article. If I want to, I can upload an image and associate it with this definition and term, but I'm not going to do that in this case. Next, I'll put LA, and LA is similar, so I'm gonna copy and paste that definition in, but this time it's feminine. So hopefully you can see how this works. Give me a minute to add a few more terms and definitions.

and then I'll resume the video. All right, I've put in four terms and definitions. Normally, I would take the time to add more than that, but for now, I'm gonna stop there, and I'll just X out of it. And you can see it listed here as a possible study set. Now, if I want to, I could even just click and drag and drop that on the map, and it's ready to go as flashcards. But I'm gonna delete that activity because that's not exactly what I want in this case. What I'd like to do is go back to this study set app that I added, and I named practice the articles. And I'll click the circle with the arrow, edit activity, and it wants me to select a study set. Well, guess what? Now, because I created the Spanish articles study set, it exists, and I can select it. There it is. Here are my definitions, and the terms are here in this crossword. I only have four terms. That's why it's better to have more than. But I actually don't want to do it as

crossword puzzle. Maybe I want to do it as a Wheel of Fortune activity or a Rockets activity, which is similar, or maybe a jigsaw activity. So here, you get to decide which activity to use, and in each case, it's pulling in my terms, my definitions from the study set that I created. Now let's say I wish I had added more to my study set. That's okay. I can just click here to edit the study set. So that's a shortcut to get right back into editing, and I can add more. And then when I'm done, X out, and the new terms and definitions should be pulled into my activities. I'm gonna go with rockets, and I'll click Save. So now I have three interactive elements on my deck that my students will be able to experience. There's something that I've skipped though, and that is how do students get from point A to point B? How do they get from the start here to the slides and then to the study set app or game? I have to provide a path for them, and if you

notice, whenever I put my mouse on the deck on my map, basically, I get some dotted lines, and that's the path. If I click on the screen right now, it will add a path between point A and point B, and that's exactly what I want. And now I can go from point B to Point C by adding another dotted line from there. I'll have them cross the bridge, basically, and then I could just keep adding dotted lines leading the students to the end goal, which in this case is this mountain. That's how the students win, by getting to the mountain. Now it is possible to create some differentiation. I could have the students make a choice: do they want to go this way and learn the articles, or do they want to go this way and learn something else, and then they can meet up here. So please imagine that I've completed this. I've put activities maybe here, here, here, here, and here, and this is a complete deck ready for my students to play. Before we leave this screen though, I want to point out a

couple of nice features. The deck builder does have one of them. Is this when you click on the circle with the arrow. It is possible to set an activity lock. Basically, I can put a lock on this activity so that students can not complete it unless they have the key. And they could get the key maybe here. Now that doesn't make a lot of sense that you get a key at the very beginning. But you could set it that way. So I could set a treasure key here. And the key ID is gold. So that will open any gold lock. So maybe I put a lock here. And a gold key will unlock it. So that's a nice feature. It basically turns your deck toys deck into a breakout room. And you can use locks and keys to help set this up as a breakout room or breakout activity. Okay let's pretend like this is done. I want to test it out before I give it to my students. So here in the upper right I'll click preview deck. It opens it up as if I were a student. So here at

the left is the teacher view and here at the right is the student view. So maybe one student on a laptop or an iPad or a Chromebook clicks here on start here. Or maybe you do it in small groups. Maybe there's a group of three students all working with the same device but they click start here and it says let's learn the Spanish articles. They close it and they go to the next step learn the articles. There they are and imagine some other great educational information here below. The students click this next arrow. They can watch the video and learn more about the articles. Then they click the arrow and a question appears. How would you say the hats in Spanish? Well that's los sombreros. Submit. That's correct. And notice that the students are getting points by answering correctly and by participating. They are earning points. So that's the end of that activity. The students close it. They've got a checkmark there. If there was a key to earn, they've earned the key. Next they move on to the next activity practice.

the articles. And this is kind of like Hangman, where I'm trying to guess what Spanish article this is. Well, it's either L or La, so I'm gonna choose E and L. Okay, there it is, I got it. I can click Next, and there's another Spanish article that comes up. So this gives the students a chance to practice what they've just learned. I'm going to X out of that and remember that that doesn't have to be a rocket activity. I could have chosen a maze or one of the many other activities and games. So the students would continue to progress through this until they reach the end. And if you want, you can have it be a race among students or groups of students. Or you can just say learn at your own pace. As long as you reach the end, you earn the credit, you win the game, whatever you want to say. Now, I would bet that the question that many of you have is, that looks good, but how do I get this to my students? So for this, I need to go back to my dashboard.

so I'll click there, and I need to create a classroom for my students. Now in the free account, and that's what I have, is a free account. I am limited to three private decks, so there's only three decks that only I can use. Everything else would have to be a public deck. And when it comes to classrooms, you're limited to two free classrooms. So I've already created one. Let's create another one so you can see how to do it. I'll click the plus sign, and I'll call this Spanish one. Click OK. It says the chosen classroom has already been taken, so I'm gonna have to vary that a little bit. Spanish one is awesome. Let's see if that's available. It is. Classroom created. Here's the address of the game. Students may access this classroom with this address, so share that with your students, and they'll be able to join your class. Now as students participate in these decks, I can go into my classroom. I can either click enter classroom to see the address for the

classroom, and to learn more about my classroom. Or I can do this. I can just click this arrow to the right of inter-classroom, and I can choose view classroom report, manage students, configure classroom. There's all of these great features that I have. So for example, with manage students, I can enter students' names. So here's Mary. I just added Mary. Here's John. Jumping back, I want you to see that I can also see a report of how they have answered and how they've done in their decks. So report gives me a report of everything that they've done. I want you to see an example of this in a real deck that people have used. So give me a second to switch to that view, and then I'll resume the video. So here I can do a couple of things. First of all, I can see all of the people that have participated in the different activities and how they've done. I can also just click on students and track each student, what activities they've completed, and the percentage correct. So that's great for formative.

assessment data. So, I really like Deck Toys. I'm impressed with it. I think it's got a lot of good things to offer to game-based learning and gamification. It really does fit into both categories and also formative assessment. Thanks for watching. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did, please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media websites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. And definitely do subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students. And when you do subscribe, please click the bell next to the subscribe button. That way you'll always be notified whenever I post another video. And watch for a video from me at least every Monday. And if you'd like to support my YouTube channel, please consider becoming a supporter of mine through my Patreon account. And you'll find links to that in the description below.

Gamification with Deck Toys

Gamification with Deck Toys