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Tools for Education

Google Forms

I remember seeing a documentary on somewhere like Harvard in which they used wireless voting handsets to indicate whether students were understanding what was being taught in realtime. In a BYOD context where everyone is connected it would be trivial to write a form to do the same. Form with a reusable question - do you understand with two or three responses as multichoice. Then write a script to chart the data in realtime - instructions on the web. Write something to delete former responses - also on the web - and you are done.

Usage:

  • clear former responses
  • tell students to fill the form and submit
  • show the graph.

trivial if everyone has a connected device and you are working in the environment.

Google Mapping and Mymaps

Mymaps takes a copy of google maps and makes an overlay. Sort of what they used to call a mashup but without the difficult coding. Uses could be to map earthquakes, pollution etc. Any statisitcal dataset that has a geospatial component can be added as a google spreadsheet. The resulting location pins can then be colour coded to allow easy visualisation of the data.

http://www.summitstuff.com/mapping-magic/mapping-with-google-tools

Google Cardboard

At the EDTeam Canberra Summit, I went to a demonstration of google cardboard. I had previously seen VR applied to teaching with various VR apps on android and IOS. The benefit and drawback of cardboard is the immersive style of this approach. This is not something to do in a normal classroom. A gym or empty hall would be good to limit the risk of collisiions as students walk with the goggles in place. At the same time the immersive experience lifts the xperience to a new level. I could see teaching history by doing tours of historical sites. Geography would be covered by close walk throughs of terrain: seeing glaciers in 3D at realistic size. The biggest issue is matching the apps to the devices, the issue below that is providing goggles for all students.

Choosing a technology to teach

Any competent IT professional can list off a series of technologies that are heavily used in industry. However these are not necessarily the best solutions for the classroom. A range of factors including wow factor and inherent scaffolding are the key selection criteria.

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Google Sites Integrating the classroom

I am currently attending The Canberra EDTechTeam Summit learning about Google Apps in education. One of the things that is a little missing if what I had seen so far is integration of google applications with student experience in a single place ie how to create a virtual classroom. this is somewhat met by the Google Applications for Education/classroom product but it is very specific as a learning management system rather than a virtual classroom. Google sites offers the ability to do integration between google applications, information and other applications/information to provide a teaching platform in the curator model. The intersection between classroom/GAFE and sites would provide the best of all worlds.

 http://www.summitstuff.com/sites-and-blogs/designing-sites-part1

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