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5 Tech Tools That Can Help With Your Daily Classroom Routine

Craig Jamieson highlights 5 edtech tools and practices that should help, rather than hinder your teaching practice…

Craig Jamieson
by Craig Jamieson
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‘Edtech’ is a funny phrase, encompassing a lot of things. It refers, of course, to educational technology – but is it a group of apps? A pedagogy? An industry (and a very lucrative one, at that)?

In my capacity as a so-called expert in such things, I have often thought to define what we mean by the term. After all, technology has affected education since we first started educating – the widespread introduction of paper in Ancient Greece caused a bit of an uproar, for example – so it’s ironic that now we are all trying to ‘go paperless’ again!

Positive, painless impact

The exponential increase in access to mobile communications, and touchscreen technology particularly, means that pupils today are more connected, more of the time, to all aspects of their lives. In my opinion, however, as teachers we have yet to fully utilise the tools that are quite literally at our fingertips.

For this article, I have therefore chosen five tools and practices that can have a real positive impact, in as painless a way as possible, on your day-to-day life as a teacher…

1. Assess on the fly Teachers are increasingly required to gather more and more assessment data, mark it, feed back to learners, store it, establish trends…need I go on? Wouldn’t it be great if there were a tool that did all this for you? If learners have access to a mobile device, then Socrative could be the answer.

Like with the ‘chat rooms’ of the noughties (remember them?) the teacher sets up a ‘room’, to which the pupils get a key code with which they can gain entry. You can assign the students pre-prepared quizzes, or you can make some illustrated ones of your own. The results can be displayed for self/peer assessment if needed, or downloaded as a spreadsheet in a few clicks.

I have used Socrative quite extensively in my own classroom, and have also heard great things about a similar tool, Kahoot.

2. Flip your classroom Flipping your classroom (as I have done; I’m @mrjamiesonflips on Twitter – go figure!) can have a great impact on the quality of the learning, engagement and interactions in certain classrooms. It can be a fairly daunting process, though, and EdPuzzle provides some neat software to help you along the way.

Create tutorials, embed videos and, crucially, slip assessment questions into the videos to assess learning. This important, Jedi-like mind trick allows the teacher to know what the pupils know (or don’t) prior to the lesson.You are then able to tailor the lesson at a more individualised level using the teacher dashboard, which even tells you how many times pupils watched a particular part of a video.

3. 6-seconds of knowledge Vine is a service that allows users to record and share 6-second looping videos. These can be used an original assessment tool in a number of ways. I have created Vines with some of my classes at the end of topics and units of work – to encapsulate key concepts, for example.. It is quite a challenge to be so concise as to fit your knowledge into six seconds, and some quite deep thought is required.

Vine is appropriate for many subjects. One of the White House’s earliest uses for its Vine account was to post a series of clips recorded at its annual science fair.

4. No tech? No problem! Plickers (derived from ‘picture clickers’) look a bit like QR codes. Once printed out on card or paper, the students can hold up in response to a question. The teacher’s mobile device then scans the responses from the front of the classroom (okay, so there is some tech involved).

The response depends on which way the pupils hold up their plicker. An app then collates and graphs the data for a quick and easy overview.

5. Collaboration One of the simplest, and indeed most valuable uses of technology in learning is the ease with which it helps pupils and teachers to collaborate. Whether using social media or cloud storage, OneDrive or Facebook, as a practitioner I have experienced a hugely positive impact on my teaching and learning from being able to freely collaborate and share ideas, resources and knowledge with other people.

Meeting agendas are shared so that everyone can add to them, communities of professional learning can be built in the cloud – the possibilities are endless, and that, of course, is what makes edtech so exciting!

Craig Jamieson is assistant head of mathematics at St Aloysius’ College, Glasgow; for more information, visit mrjamiesonflips.wordpress.com or follow @mrjamiesonflips

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