8 Terrific and Not-So-Terrific Technology Tools

Below are assessments of eight technology tools that can be used in the classroom. I give the assessments a holistic score, in that I am not breaking my final judgments down according to rubric-worthy criteria and do allow some room for subjectivity to creep in. These scores are on a collegiate academic scale of A to B-. 

A technology tool receives an “A” if it is excellent as is; while it mostly likely will be improved in some way in the near future, I am at a loss to predict how it could be.  A “B” is for a tool that is good, but that could be augmented in a few minor ways. A “B-” is for a tool that is average and could be improved in several major ways. A “C” would be for a tool that is below average and would take many major improvements to be useful, but none of the below tools merit such a grade.  

Due to the personal preferences of the author, aesthetic and sometimes affective factors are given more weight. As the author is also cheap, financial considerations may also drag down a grade.

Firefox: A

Firefox is a browser that is quick, user-friendly, and safe.  It might possibly be too safe, as it blocks almost any pop-up and cookie, but to my mind, a mind that has been nearly digitally lobotomized by computer viruses and the colorful, sharp noise of unwanted online shilling in the past, there is no such thing as too safe. To my knowledge, it was the first browser to use tabs, in that when I first started using it five or so years ago, other browsers were not using them. While this convenient and desktop space-saving feature is now fairly standard, the fact that Firefox did that first earns it my trust as a browser that has had my best interests at heart since I first met it. Love at first sight and fidelity over the years earns it an A.

Google Docs: A-

Google Docs allows a user to create, edit, and save documents without having to download and open them with Office software. Along with those advantages, it also allows a level of interactivity that would not typically be allowed with such documents; users can share documents and edit them simultaneously with the sharers. It also has a wonderful form feature that allows users to send a simple survey via email and organizes the results in a spreadsheet as the recipients submit their responses. The main drawback of Google Docs is that the word processing and spreadsheet functions do not have the same wide array of features as their Office counterparts; for example, when editing Word documents, the user will not have the same selection of fonts or layout options as with Word; when editing Excel documents, the user does not have the same amount of options in presenting data in charts. However, this is a tool that is highly portable in that it can be used on almost any device, from a tablet, to a PC, to a Mac, and that helps cut down on the amount of space documents take up in a hard drive, as it is stored online. Those two advantages, along with its exceptional interactivity, nearly make up for its limited features.

MOODLE: B-

MOODLE is a course management system that allows educators to create online courses or to support face-to-face ones. When I assess a site, how it looks is the first criterion that comes to mind. While educators can tailor the look of a site somewhat to their personal taste and the needs of the class, I’ve yet to see a MOODLE site that looks all that good—either in choice of font, color, or spacing of elements. The reason for that is that MOODLE sites are usually content-rich. In fact they are so saturated with content—with all sorts of information that is both useful and necessary—that they are an easy place to get lost. Unfortunately, when you get lost on this site you miss an assignment and your grade goes down and/or you lose the respect of the instructor, who is secretly—or not so secretly—disappointed that you, a student in higher education, did not have the good judgment or acumen to thoroughly examine each feature and link of a site that plays a key role in your academic future. While college students should know better, MOODLE might be improved by further compartmentalizing its elements, perhaps, by separating them like a webpage into a more simplified homepage with tabbed categories.

Weebly.com: B

Weebly.com allows users to create simple but aesthetically pleasing websites with a broad range of attractive templates. Its editor is easy to use, allowing elements to be placed on a page through drag and drop. However, the layout options are limited; for example, when moving pictures around a document, there are few text wrap options and often the text winds up in an undesired area on the page. The editor is also glitchy in terms of placing captions on a picture. In fact, “glitchy” typifies the published result, as sometimes elements are not immediately updated or sometimes the end result ends up unintended in terms of layout and font. The other limitations of Weebly.com is that it only allows a user to create two websites for free before upgrading to “pro” and paying for its services; one can also not have a non-Weebly.com address or run ad-free without upgrading. The premium plan is affordable at around $5 a month, but the fact that the number of websites one can create is limited makes that price difficult to accept.

Wix.com: A-

Wix.com is another website creator with a wide range of attractive templates, but it outdoes Weebly.com in that its websites are flash-based. This allows a user to create dynamic sites with moving photo galleries and snappy—or slowly graceful—transitions between pages. Users who upgrade to premium service can use a personal domain, remove ads, and get extra storage. The number of websites a user can create is limited to a certain amount of storage space on the server. (This user has created three already and has yet to reach the limit.) Premium service is a little more expensive than Weebly, but the casual user does not necessarily need its premium options. The casual user can be as cheap, as he or she wants and still put together an engaging website. One possible demerit might be given for an editor that, while intuitive, is a tad oversensitive; an errant touch can send an element flying off the sitemap.

PowerPoint: B-

I evaluate PowerPoint here because my attitude toward PowerPoint has changed as I have explored website creators. I used to believe that PowerPoint was the ultimate tool for class instruction; it allowed instructors varied ways to reach learners—through image, text, video—ways that complemented a lecture and made instructions easier to follow. However, its main drawback is that it lacks dynamism of other tools now available, and it is too linear. It is difficult to go from slide 15 to slide 7--and be entirely sure that slide 7 is the one you wanted in the first place. While the content of a lesson can be separated into categories and chunked into smaller parts on a website, it is difficult to do that with a PowerPoint presentation. Websites provide a better way of compartmentalizing a lesson into more easily remembered parts of a whole, where a topic is separated into different pages with each page having different subsections. Not having that structure is where PowerPoint fails. It also fails in its lack of portability. They are designed to be projected on a large screen, and although instructors often make their PowerPoint available to students via e-mail or MOODLE site, the student-aesthete might find it off-putting to read a document in such large type on his/her desktop.

GoAnimate.com: A-

This website allows users to create animated stories of varying degrees of complexity. A person can use quick templates to make a cartoon in a few minutes or an editing screen to create a “video from scratch.” The choices are many—for settings, characters, text-to-sound voices, effects, and ways to share via Facebook, Twitter or email—and an amateur cartoonist can make appealingly customized and multifaceted works without going into premium territory. The one advantage of their premium plan—beyond larger galleries of scenes, characters and effects—is that it allows a user to upload directly to Youtube. The fact that this one valuable feature is not free knocks it down a fraction of a grade. All the same, premium packages are not too expensive, starting at $18 for three months, considering the range of features offered, and users are awarded website-specific currency every time they log in and create a cartoon.

Vyew.com: B

Vyew.com is a web-conferencing tool that allows users to collaborate in an online environment via text chat, webcam, and audio. Meeting rooms have whiteboards on which one can insert videos, text documents, images and music, and facilitate discussion with highlighting and marking tools and comment features such as sticky notes. It installs easily, loads fairly quickly and is user-friendly in terms of functions being easy to find and figure out. However, the webcams sometimes do not immediately load or load at all and the audio is glitchy; if users are not wearing headsets with microphones, the room becomes an echo chamber. Free use is limited to 10 users and the creation of 20 rooms, but the premium plans are somewhat affordable, starting at $10 a month.

Assistive Technology: Helping Students Be Nothing Special

Last year, I taught English Language Learners on Guam. The accommodations and modifications suggested by the Department of Education for my classes were numerous but surprisingly mundane--a long list of special techniques and strategies to aid second language learning that were, in truth, not all that special. 

For example, I, as an ELL instructor, was urged to make frequent use of visual aids and graphic organizers. I was to differentiate instruction and use cooperative learning groups.  I was to allow them more time to complete tasks.

I found myself planning lessons that could be used in any classroom, using data-based strategies that would be effective with any student. For example, using think-pair-share techniques with generous wait time for responses combined the benefits of cooperative learning with the time allowance necessary for eliciting well-thought out responses. Using a PowerPoint presentation allowed students to both see and hear the key points of the lesson. These are all recommended practices for any student.

Turning to the needs of another group of diverse learners, students with disabilities, I find myself rediscovering the same idea: to design a lesson for students with disabilities, I might as well design a universal one. Smith and Tyler (2010), in their Introduction to Special Education, write that “universal design for learning techniques and differentiated instruction help all students profit" (p. 38). Assistive technology (AT) helps a student with a disability benefit even more from these well-researched techniques, but, more than that, allows that student nearly full and unaccommodated participation.

A typical English lesson might begin with an advance organizer such as a KWL, wherein students engage prior knowledge and make predictions by writing what they already Know, what they Want to know, and then filling in what they've Learned after reading. It might then be followed by reading a passage and labeling the elements of that story. An essay might then be assigned as homework on the major theme of the story. 

For a class with students with disabilities, the KWL might be completed on a computer with voice recognition software to aid those who have motor impairments. Audiobooks would benefit those with visual impairments in the reading portion of the lesson. The elements of a story could be sorted on a computer program aiding those with learning disabilities by helping them see text more clearly and those with attention deficit disorder by helping them stay focused. Word processing software would also aid the learning disabled person in writing, organizing and editing their essay, as well as the physically impaired learner--and any other student.

To sum up, AT could be used for all portions of this lesson--and to the advantage of all learners. For the middle elements of the lesson, perhaps, one would not normally think of using technology, but both audiobooks and computer games and manipulative programs have the merit of engaging all students, as they both help students learn through multiple intelligences—the former engaging both verbal and auditory intelligences, the second visual and kinesthetic.

In the video, Assistive Technology: Enabling Dreams, a young woman with cerebral palsy, Susanna Sweeney-Martini, speaks of all the ways AT helps her live a full life (Ellis, 2005). A computer helps her do her homework; a wheelchair allows mobility.  “Assistive Technology  is the major foundation of my life,” she says. “Without it, I could not exist as I am today.”

It is a foundation that allows her access to a world of learning that does not need to be altered to fit a disability; it allows her to be more than that disability. A least restrictive environment is mandated for students with disabilities by federal law and moral right. AT in the classroom allows those who are mainstreamed to participate in that environment to the fullest extent, to learn with special strategies and technologies which are really not that special because they are for everyone.

References

Ellis, Ken. (2005). Assistive Technology: Enabling Dreams [Video File]. Retrieved July 18, 2011 from http://www.edutopia.org/assistive-technology-enabling-dreams-video.

Smith, D. D., & Tyler, N. C. (2010). Introduction to Special Education: Making a Difference (7th ed., p. 38). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill.

Reflection 1: Lesson Plan 1

I created a website as a framework for a middle school reading/language arts lesson plan with the ultimate objective of enriching student responses to a text through the use of the “Forms” function of Google Docs spreadsheets (Fee, 2011, para. 1). 

This objective aligns my lesson with NETS*T Standard 1.c., which encourages teachers to “promote student reflection using collaborative tools to reveal and clarify students' conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes” (International Society for Technology in Education, 2008, para. 1).  It does this by having students conduct an online survey of reader responses, aggregating that data on a spreadsheet and portraying those responses as a chart.

Yet, while this objective is germane to the latest educational technology pronouncements, at first, it did not have immediate relevance to my own teaching beliefs. To use technology to quantify a response to literature, seemed to me to be at best impersonally anathema to effective reading, and at worst, faddish. It also seemed impossible.

The class I took prior to this one was on teaching reading and writing to secondary school students. In this class, we studied transactional theory, in which, according to Rosenblatt (2005), readers consider initial and emotional responses to create the text, focusing on sensing, thinking, feeling, and structuring, and forging "from sound and rhythm and image and idea…a poem or play or novel” (p. 27). Reading is a personal and creative process, we learned, and the English major in me embraced this idea. That English major, who is probably a little too sentimental for the person he now inhabits, had a hard time figuring out how spreadsheets and math figured into reading.

The worst and best part of this assignment was the challenge of it.  At first, it felt difficult to an overwhelming degree, but now that feeling has given way to the sense of either the achievement or delusion of overcoming that difficulty.  All I had to do was to find a happy place in reading for counting.  This normally isn’t productive; in fact, counting words and treating a text as a body to dissect most likely engenders in a reader the opposite of what I’d like to promote to my students: it grows boredom.

The only way to properly use counting in literature, I thought, was not to count words but to count how others feel about the text. If readers truly transact with a text, and create a personalized version of a novel or poem or play within them, colored and shaped by their own experience, then each person’s interpretation could be different. It would be interesting to find out what others think, how others respond to the same text, as it doesn’t wind up being the same text for each reader. 

Students could then learn how to see how others respond to a work of literature, and, more than that, could look at evidence from the text to explain those viewpoints. By surveying others using technology as a facilitator, a person could see how others think, and to return to the NETS*T standard quoted above could “clarify…conceptual understanding.”

And math and reading could transact peacefully and productively. To sum up, the best part of this assignment, was when I figured out that technology could make a lesson interesting and that something as closed and concrete as a spreadsheet can open up a person’s understanding of others and of a work of literature.

I feel, however, that I could have made the lesson more challenging. If I were to revise this lesson, I might allow students to figure out how to use the programs on their own. Online tutorials are everywhere. I might have let the students take more of a role in their own learning, instead of overexplaining. I might have also given them an active role in both evaluating other groups of students and themselves and in justifying those evaluations to me.

References

Fee, J. (2011, July 11). A Technology-Enriched Lesson Plan. Retrieved July 11, 2011, from Calculating Responses website: http://ed609summerlessonplan1.weebly.com/index.html.

International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). NETS for Teachers 2008. Retrieved July 11, 2011 from http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-teachers/nets-for-teachers-2008.aspx.

Rosenblatt, L. M. (2005). From “Literature as Exploration” and “The Reader, the Text, the Poem.” Voices from the Middle, 12(3), pp 25-30.