Secondary Ed. Tech: New & Revisited
EdTech conferences have become a ubiquitous part of the public ed. landscape as more and more districts push tech-based initiatives and launch 1:1 programs. Some are great; some are a great waste of time. Overrun by vendors and money interests, the “sessions” at such conferences can end up being little more than glorified sales pitches for this new tool or that new gadget often delivered by someone with a year of bonafide classroom experience (If you’re lucky.) masquerading as an educator.
Not so with the annual IU13 EdTech conference. This event is always a worthwhile venture primarily because many of its sessions are requested, designed and delivered by actual area teachers who know what works with our kids and which tools are worth our investment of time. So, let this list represent the best recommendations of your fellow educators for 2018. Some may be new, some may be old news to you, but all are worth (re)visiting as possibilities for your digital bag o’ tricks.
Get Your Kids Talking with Flipgrid
This tool is one many are undoubtedly familiar with, but what you may not know is that it was bought up by Microsoft this past summer and is now TOTALLY FREE for all users! This development makes Flipgrid the absolute best tool available for foreign language, ELA, ELD, and humanities teachers, or really any teacher who wants students to practice their speaking skills, or who just wants an engaging but very SIMPLE way for students to demonstrate their understandings.
If you’ve never used it before, think of it as a video discussion board. Students reply to your “topic” with a brief video, and subsequently reply to each other’s videos (if you allow for it) to create a sort of asynchronous virtual conversation. It works like this:
- Create a “grid.” Most choose to do one grid per class.
- Add a new topic to your grid. This area is where you add the prompt that you want students to respond to as well as set time, privacy, feedback, moderation settings and many other options.
- Share your flipcode with your kids. Students access via the app or the web, enter the code, and they’re ready to start recording.
- Pro tips — Use the “Add Topic Guests” feature to allow family members, building principals or other interested parties the opportunity to check out your kids’ work. Guests can even record their own video responses if you allow for it. Use the #Gridpals feature to make connections with other teachers and classrooms around the world! Hello, authentic real-world collaboration potential!
You can take a deep dive on the Gridpals feature here, or learn everything you need to know to get started on Flipgrid in the 2-min video below!
Fire Up that Debate with Kialo
Because I love words, and tech, and arguing about darn near anything any random person is willing to go a round with me about, I’ve been spending far too much of my free time geeking out on Kialo ever since I heard about it. It is billed as “a debate tool powered by reason,” meant to cut through the mess and noise of traditional online debate. Its slick design and ease of use make it an extremely powerful tool for English, ESL, Social Studies, Health, Science or really any other subject where a controversial issue might be worth discussing. How about using it as faculty or committee meeting facilitation tool?
As a teacher, you can do as little or as much setup of the debate as you want by adding an arguable point, claims, pros and cons, and then unleash your kids to start fleshing out the debate with a web of arguments. Requiring that they support their additions with web-linked evidence elevates the DOK even further. Debates can be privatized to keep the discussion in-house or open to the general public to explore a wider variety of perspectives.
One interesting way to use this tool might be to essentially “crowd source” research of argumentative essays by establishing a topic and requiring students to each plug in X number of claims with associated links to source info. The resulting web of collective knowledge could serve as a massive organizer for everyone’s essay.
It helps to take a few minutes to explore some well-established debate topics first to get your feet wet before creating your own. Just try not to fall too far down the rabbit hole like I did, or you might wonder where your evening went! Their intro video is also well worth two minutes of your time.
Get Your Facts Straight with DuckDuckGo, Voyant-Tools, allsides.com and more.
Google stalks you. It’s marginally creepy, and it’s very likely affecting your world view more significantly than you might realize. Don’t believe me? Believe this guy; he’s probably smarter than me.
This echo-chamber effect is problematic in your private life, but it’s even more problematic when you’re trying to teach your students how to gain a balanced perspective on a hot-button issue. Luckily, DuckDuckGo can save you from your own browsing history. In their own words:
Simply searching in DuckDuckGo instead of Google will at least ensure that your students aren’t being unduly influenced by their own information bubble. Couple this strategy with a tool like allsides.com balanced search or balanced dictionary and your students can start to see the full, untainted picture of any given issue. The allsides tools allow students to search any topic or term and give back results that factually define the issue as well as articles from a variety of sources that are labeled as either right, left (to varying degrees) or balanced reporting. It takes some of the guess work out of reading for balance, and allows students to understand how information is being presented to them and how that presentation might be influencing their understanding.
Last but not least in this bevy of information-balancing tools is voyant-tools.com. Voyant Tools will analyze any text or URL entered into it (Copied text seems to give back better results than URLs.) and create a word cloud, a frequency chart, a summary of use, a list of phrasal correlations and many other insights into the language of the source text. It’s a great way to uncover potential bias in a text or to highlight the way a text’s structure may be manipulating its readers.
Bonus Tidbits for Real-Time Collaboration
Try mentimeter.com for your next class poll or formative assessment. It’s quick and easy to create slides, and there are a good variety of question types. My favorite is the “word cloud,” which generates an instant dynamic cloud based on students’ answers. Students don’t need accounts; they just go to menti.com and enter a custom 6-digit code. You can literally be up and running with your first menti in under 5 minutes total prep time, easily.
Try Google’s jamboard (both iOS and web-based, but the app is better) for all your virtual white-boarding needs. The app is actually designed to be used with Google’s physical Jamboards (interactive touch screens) but they’re not at all necessary to take advantage of the app. Virtual boards are easy to create, can contain as many screens as you like and can be pushed out to multiple users for collaboration via a code system. There are a slew of slick tools (more on that over on the Elementary conference breakdown) and since it’s google-integrated, anything saved to your Google Drive can be instantly embedded on your board, and all work is saved back to your Drive as well.
That’s all I’ve got for now. As always, if you’ve got any questions, you know where to find me…slamming cookies and eggnog next to the Christmas tree! Happy Holidays!
