The third presentation that I gave today at the Colonial Tech Conference was titled Discovery, Discussion, and Demonstration. For this short presentation I did not use slides. Instead, I demonstrated a handful of my favorite educational technology tools and strategies for using them. Here’s what I shared:
Discovery:
We looked at using interesting images as the basis of search challenges that we give to students. The idea here being to get students to consider information visible to them before starting to search. We then looked at tools that students (and some teachers) overlook when conducting searches. Those tools were Google Scholar, Google Books, and searching by file type and domain.
Discussion:
In this section we tried out Dotstorming, Padlet, and Formative.
On Dotstorming you can create a space for people to post digital sticky notes. Those notes can contain text and or images. That part of Dotstorming is just like Padlet. What makes Dotstorming different is that once the notes are posted, you can have people vote for their favorite notes. As the creator of a Dotstorming space you can restrict the number of votes that each person can cast. For example, you could say that each person gets two votes and once those votes are cast they’re prevented from casting any more votes. After the voting is completed, you can sort the notes according to the number of votes they received.
Formative is a tool for gathering feedback from students in real-time. One of the best features of Formative is the option to have students sketch responses to questions. They can sketch on their tablets, Chromebooks, or laptops and submit those sketches to you in realtime. In the video embedded below I provide a demonstration of how the draw responses function works in Formative.
Padlet is a tool that I’ve been recommending for years. You can use it as a micro-blogging platform, as an exit ticket tool, as a brainstorming space, or as a KWL chart. Learn all about Padlet in the videos below.
Demonstration:
In this section we looked at the idea of using video blog entries. We also looked at the digital portfolio tool, SeeSaw.
