Education Technology Tools!

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Photo from https://thelearningcounsel.com/article/classroom-future

I had a class this evening on Education Technology tools and was exposed to some pretty amazing resources. I want to highlight a couple favorites (at least at first sight) that I think could lead to really positive outcomes in the classroom.

Flocabulary: This is a website dedicated to educational rap videos. Pretty frickin' sweet. A wonderful way to get students excited about a new topic at the beginning of a unit. Also inspiring if I assign students to make their own rap songs about a topic!

Equity Maps: This tool lets you track who is speaking in a class discussion. As the teacher, you press on a student's icon when they are speaking. At the end of the discussion the software produces easy to understand charts that show how much time each student spoke for. It can also breakdown based on gender (and I believe other demographic categories) to gauge how much different student sub-populations are engaged in the conversation. Pros: I could see this being useful in whole class discussions if frontloaded properly with a conversation about how we want everyone's voice to be heard. Then displaying the live data on a screen so that students can see how much they have/have not spoken would, I hope, lead to more equitable student participation. Cons: Could take a teacher's attention away from the conversation, as teacher has to monitor using the app. However, this could be a good thing to reduce the teacher's voice. Alternatively, a TA might be tasked with operating the app so that the teacher could focus more fully on facilitation.

Datanuggets: This website provides up-to-date data sets from a wide variety of scientists for students to analyze. Classroom activities/worksheets are provided to go along with the data, along with stories about the scientist(s) who collected it. I like this idea a lot! It provides an authenticity to classroom work that is easily missed in hypothetical situations. I imagine students would learn quite a bit about the topic of research in addition to how to analyze data through the process of analyzing it.

I have a huge ongoing list of educational technology resources, so maybe I'll post about more of them in the future! If you, dear reader, have any suggested EdTech tools, please share!

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