1. FLOOP
One of the good ways to improve one’s learning ability is to give and receive feedback. There is a correlation between how quickly students grasp the concept and how specific the explanations are. Teachers created Floop in order to speed up and improve the quality of feedback.
Here’s the breakdown: Images of student work-in-progress and questions they have for the teacher are sent via email. Teacher reviews student work, adds comments based on specific photo locations, then sends it back to students, establishing a feedback loop that promotes iteration and improvement.
The mechanism that allows students to point to places on their work where they need assistance and then receive the assistance that can also target specific spots on the assignment makes this tool unique. With writing assignments, such as Google Docs’ commenting feature, we’ve been able to accomplish this. However, it hasn’t been as easy to do in other subject areas.
Although I’m not sure how teachers will be able to maintain a work-life balance while using this tool, it provides more opportunities for specific, immediate feedback than anything I’ve ever seen.
2. GOOSECHASE
BreakoutEDU fans are likely to enjoy GooseChase as well. Teams of students compete for items you assign (in the real world) and then take photos and post them on this app to prove their location. Scavenger hunts made easy with this app. The app keeps track of team points, so you can see which team came out on top at the end of the game. Check out this video if you’d like a more in-depth look at how the app works.
Read More: Craigslist Cleveland
Fun, interactive team-building activities can be created with this tool, which includes icebreaker games at start of the school year as well as new student orientation and field trips. To keep it focused while still getting your kids moving and working together, you can plug in any content you like.
3. IORAD
To be honest, it took me a time to get my head around this tool. It’s not that it was difficult (it’s actually very simple), but I had to be shown it twice because I’d never seen anything like it before. When I finally got my head around it, I was awestruck by its educational potential.
So iorad is a screencasting tool in that it allows you to create interactive online tutorials that telss how to do things on a computer’s display. If you wanted to show students how to use a piece of technology, you could make a video. Because the video stops every few seconds to ask the user to follow your prompts and only continues if they do, you can create a video that resembles a screencast but is actually interactive. There’s a better chance that this will help students retain information more effectively.
Using iorad, I’m excited to see what educators and students can come up with. Flipped learning, teaching classroom or tech procedures, or student-created instructional videos could all benefit from this tool.
4. PARLAY
I’ve heard the most buzz about this tool this year, and it’s easy to see why: Parlay has put together a thoughtful set of tools for conducting class discussions.
Begin by selecting a topic from their collection: These include readings and videos to help students prepare for the class discussion. Then, students write their own responses to the prompt and respond to each other’s responses in a written format. The class can use Parlay to track and facilitate their participation for the final roundtable discussion. The teacher will receive a report at the conclusion of the discussion detailing who participated and in what manner.
Parlay appears to be a great supplement for anyone who uses Harkness, Socratic Seminar, or any other form of whole-class discussion as part of their instruction.
5. STOP MOTION STUDIO
This tool allows users to create stop motion videos made from a series of photos in which only a small amount of movement occurs in each frame. With this app, you can use a green screen tool to change the background and music clips and sound effects and a library of music clips.
Students can benefit from the potential of this tool. They should write in a variety of ways, from entertaining and telling stories to making compelling arguments and informing others. As a short film script, many of these texts would likely have more impact than a piece of written work. A tool like Stop Motion Studio makes it possible for students to put together a short film in the classroom without ever leaving the classroom.
6. CREATABILITY
To make the arts more accessible to people with disabilities, Google has developed a set of tools called “experiments” called “Creativity”. With these tools, you can play a keyboard, draw on a canvas by moving your face, and even make music by moving your body, all by moving your face, body, mouse, or keys.
More experiments are likely to follow if this is an ongoing project, but I thought it was worth directing people over to play around with what they already have up there. You never know what your non-arts-oriented students can come up with if you give them these tools.
