Edtech Tools We Love

Blogging Challenge 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.

Meg and Jamie- Edtech tools, one of our favorite topics!

The edtech tool that has most transformed the way students show us their thinking and learning is blogging.  We love KidBlog with a deep passion.  It is so very user-friendly, and it allows some of our most timid students to find their voice.  

Our favorite edtech tool!

We love that students have the ability to embed hyperlinks, images and videos just like any other blogging platform. The global audience also motivates (most of) our students to produce more thoughtful products than they did prior to blogging.  We rate Kidblog 4 stars out of 4!

For organization and providing student feedback, we love Google Drive.  Within Google Drive students can create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and respond to Google Forms we create.  We love the ease in  which it allows students to share their work with us so we can provide comments/feedback as they are working right on the document or presentation, and we love the collaborative piece these Google tools afford students.  

Some final thoughts from Meg:

I have only one complaint .  It is the iPad interface for Google Docs is awful.  It has limited capabilities, and the typing freezes on a regular basis when my kids use it on their iPads.  I give the desktop version of Google Drive and corresponding tools 4 stars, but I need to give the iPad version of Google Docs 2 stars.

Finally, my (Meg’s) newest edtech favorite is Educreations.  My students just got iPads this year, and Educreations is one of the first apps we tried.  Success!  The students were able to create great math tutorial videos on number line topics, and after one 46 class minute of playing around and experimenting, the students were able to productively and efficiently produce the video in the following day’s 46 minute class.  My only suggestions to Educreations are to allow for editing a video after publishing, as well as providing the capability to erase only the audio associated with one slide rather than forcing the creator to erase the entire audio file for the project.  The company did respond to our suggestions quickly assuring us that these functionalities were in the works for future upgrades.  I give Educreations a 3.5 stars, with the potential for a full 4 stars on the horizon!

Why did Jamie not comment on the iPads?  At our middle school, only the sixth grade teachers and students work with iPads.  The seventh and eighth grade will be getting MacBook Airs next year--yippee!  I (Jamie) am having fun exploring the one I recently got in advance of the students, but that is a future blog post.