This year I jumped the Great Firewall and landed in China, in a new life and new role as High School Learning & Technology Coach. It has been a great learning experience so far, and as a techy learning nerd, I’ve been able to try out new tools for learning and supporting teachers. I’m not easily impressed by EdTech products, but over the last couple of years some great stuff that focuses on learning (not just ‘more tech’) has been coming out.
Here are some of my favourites – they’re not all new, but some were new to me and of course they need to be China-friendly.
Curation Tools
Over the last decade I’ve been creating, curating and sharing through my i-Biology.net site and on here, powered by WordPress. I love this platform, but over the last few years have been tinkering with other tools to make collecting and sharing easier for me and for others.
LibGuides
Inspired by Nadine & Jeri, the teacher-librarians here at WAB, I’ve really got into LibGuides. It’s huge, amazing and (I think) pretty pricey, though as I’ve been getting settled here I’ve been building my own TigerTech group and resources on there to support teaching and learning. It can embed almost anything and with a little tinkering can look pretty cool.
I have a lot to learn from my colleagues, but I am loving this tool!
Wakelet and Padlet Backpack
Two simple but great tools. Wakelet has replaced the functions I used to use Diigo and Twitter bookmarks, and has potential to take the place of Storify in archiving Twitter chats and events. See Tanya LeClair’s Wakelet about Wakelet here for loads of ideas. I use the mobile app a lot for quickly saving things to read for later, or categorising them for use in different parts of my job.
Padlet Backpack ($$) is the schools version of Padlet, with teacher and student accounts. Great for collecting up group responses, student ideas, resources and comes with a range of different layouts and privacy settings in the school domain.
Both Padlet and Wakelet can be embedded easily, and they both seem to work fine in Libguides, Moodle & Google Sites.
Learning Tools
Equity Maps (iPad)
I love this iPad app and have tweeted about it a lot since I came across it after reading Alexis Wiggins’s Best Class You Never Taught. Taking the Spiderweb discussion/ Harkness table method and turning it into a simple, data-informed tool for empowering group discussion, Equity Maps makes the learning community responsible to their own data. It exemplifies the cultural forces of interactions, expectations and language, and can work really well in a range of discussions. I have used it in meetings as well. It’s one of those rare EdTech apps that goes beyond gimmicks & flash and focuses on making the learning visible.
Edji.it
This is a brilliant social reading app, designed by a teacher for teachers and great for gathering student reflection, questions and comments on a shared reading. Very simple, very powerful – try an example here.
If you are interested, use this link to sign up for a free account (referring five people will give a free year of Edji).
Microsoft Translator
This is super cool. Microsoft translator allows for translation through your device with typing, talking, tap-and-talk conversations and scanning. It also facilitates group translations, where participants can join in a conversation or presentation online, using their own language. Very neat. Give it a go here.
Easy Rubric
This iPad app is useful for grading and note-taking on the go.
A Few More Technoids
Here are some more recent #EdTech highlights for me, shared through Twitter.
