Day 13 | Name the top #edtech tools that you use on a consistent basis in the classroom, and rank them in terms of their perceived (by you) effectiveness.
I don't know if I have a ranking per se, but if I have to, the order in which I've talked about the tools below...
#Google, google, and more google. In the last 1.5 years I have fallen in love with the awesomeness of Google in the classroom. I use @googledrive daily for all of my teaching and coaching needs; rarely touching my flash drive(s) that were irreplaceable to me.
I know Dropbox and other similar "in the cloud" storage has been available for quite awhile, but I had never jumped on that bandwagon...until Google. I had inquired about using Google in Education 4 or 5 years ago, but was told we weren't going that route. Things changed, and then all of a sudden, we had access. As I began slowly poking around, realizing how easy it was to manage, access across all devices, collaborate with people, etc., I was hooked.
When I started teaching in 2003-4, I built my own website from the ground up with Dreamweaver. I kept up with Dreamweaver through the 2012-13 school year. I never switched to anything else because I am a rather particular person who wanted complete control over their site's set-up; Dreamweaver did that for me.
Last school year I decided I'd give @googlesites a whirl, since I was using Drive so much, the district had gotten us the Google Education accounts, etc. - kind of figured I better check it out. I run into hiccups here-and-there, but it's rare. I have tinkered around with it enough to make it completely my own and love it. The selling point for me was being able to work on it on whatever device I felt like, wherever I was; no more having to install Dreamweaver all over the place and remembering to upload changes.
Last fall, someone in a chat mentioned the add-on #Doctopus - I'd never heard of it. It sounded really cool, but I had a student teacher in my Economics class at the time, so I didn't do anything with it. In the spring, Google Sheets updated with their add-on feature, making those cool extras, for lack of a better word, permanent. That's when I checked out Doctopus. I found a video on #youtube, demonstrating the steps needed to implement the feature, and have never looked back.
I used to use Smart Notebook and the Senteo remotes all the time, but since adopting my Google Site, using Forms (with #Flubaroo) or other easy assessment tools with a phone or other device, I've basically abandoned Smart. It was taking 5-minutes to load a file, and that was just too much for me.
@Padlet (thank you Kirsten) is another tool I've used and find amazing. I'm a very visual person, so it appealed to me right off the bat. I like it for vocabulary and posting evidence for standards.
@Tackk is (from their site) a simple way to create beautiful pages on the web. It's your very own page, flyer, blog post, or poster. For me, another cool way to show off what you know about something in class.
I am liking @Nearpod a lot right now to give notes/lecture a different spin. The reports feature is very nice and easy to track students during that time. I want to do more with it, so it will be a work in progress throughout the year. I hear @Peardeck is similar, so I may try that to see what it's like because it connects with Drive.
There are other things I've used and others I will try, but those are the most frequent right now. I try to look for different things all of the time so students have an option (down the road) to choose from for a final piece of work.
No comments:
Post a Comment