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After reading the first two chapter's of Don't Ditch That Tech, by Matt Miller. I was inspired to learn a few new tech tools and revisit some tools I haven't used in a while. As a school administrator I work with teachers and administrators daily. Here are three ways I want to improve what I do, digitally.
1. Increase personalized learning with interactive tutorials
Tech tool: iorad the free tutorial builder
With this free extension you can build tutorials with any app. One of my favorite features in this app is the way it easily builds the tutorial for you. Genius! No more trying to record my screen while trying to highlight locations and where to click. The app does it for you and you can easily edit any step. I have made many 'how to' videos for teachers and this app just saved me tons of time.Here is my first tutorial with iorad - a quick tutorial about how to create a blog new post with Blogger. I really like how you can customize the highlight boxes and text. It will even auto generate the voice over! For those days when you just don't feel like talking.
This is a great tutorial maker. I like that it is a Chrome extension, students could use it to and create helpful tutorials for concepts they have mastered.
Here's an interactive tutorial for the visual learners
2. Increase Student Content Creation
Tech tool: Thinglink
Thinglink was founded in Finland in 2010. It has been growing in the USA since 2013. With Thinglink students create highly engaging and dynamic images that can be shared anywhere in the world. Students can create or find an image, upload it to Thinglink and then tag it with text, web links, videos, or images. You can even create augmented 360 videos in Thinglink. What a great way for students to create a virtual tour of their school or classroom! This tool can be used in any subject area and allows teachers to modify and re-design their assignments. With a $35 dollar premium account, teachers can manage students and help them master digital skills to help them in future college or career endeavors.
Here are some ways I have used Thinglink:
- To augment my presenter promo slide for Fall CUE
- Highlighting Women in Science
See more examples here
Want to try it? Here are 5 ways to use Thinglink in the classroom right now:
- Book character bios - students create or find an image of the character and tag it with related information and media that they find on the web or create themselves.
- Maps - have students tag a map with a "Top 5" - top ... engineering feats in the world, battle sites, Civil Rights hotspots, scientists in the world...you get the idea.
- Close read of an image - practice close reading skills with an image, have students leave a tag of an observation they make of the image, you could also do this with a piece of text.
- Life Cycles - have students create stop motion animations of a life cycle and tag an image of the life cycle with the videos they create.
- Photo walk - students can create a collage of images they take and then tag the images with location, description, interpretation, etc.
3. YouTube Playlists for Content Curation
Tech tool: YouTube
Curating more content for teachers is another way I can improve what I do. YouTube Playlists let me assemble videos for any topic I want and then easily share the list with teachers. One thing I love about this is that YouTube allows me to centralize my content for easy accessibility. I just have to make sure teachers follow me on YouTube and then they can easily find any playlist I have created.
Playlists I have created so far:
