Abstract:

Apps and Web tools have a potential to help increase student learning, collaboration and model ideas for integrating technology into workplace, teaching or learning settings. Below are eight examples and how they can be used in the classroom for student collaboration, polling surveys, project management, animation, formative assessment and as a graphics organizer introducing students a class or a topic. The apps and Web tools that will be presented are: Socrative, Padlet, TodaysMeet, Schoology, Moovly, Trello, Nearpod, Google Docs Voice Typing, and LiveScribe.

Socrative originally was created as an online instant response tool for K-12 schools, yet its features can also be used in higher education institutions, especially to get college students actively participate in quizzes, discussions, and other class activities. Mainly, it is used for quizzes, but can also be employed for group activities, or to ask the students a quick question, such as a poll that will let students determine a certain decision.
In this particular class, Socrative's quiz feature was employed in order to prepare the students for their mid-term examination.

Padlet is an online bulletin board where students and teachers work on projects to create visually appealing bulletins. In this particular class, a padlet was created to provide students an organizational framework to display the discussion topics.

TodaysMeet was designed for teachers to extend instructional conversations beyond the classroom giving all students a voice. This tool was used in a face-to-face undergraduate class as a formative assessment tool to incorporate Muddy Point or Minute Paper format.

Schoology is a Learning Management System (LMS) that can be used by K-12, Higher Ed and also the corporate world. Schoology was used in the “Turn Your Classroom Digital” course because of its ease of use and robustness of the platform to create and organize content.

Moovly is a free tool to create animated videos and presentations. Moovly was used in the “Turn Your Classroom Digital” course to create online content. Most of the students found it very simple and intuitive to use. They especially liked the hand drawing tool to convert their static images into hand-drawn animations.

Trello is a project management and collaboration tool that organizes content into visual boards. Trello can also be used for peer-review projects as well as an advance organizer for introducing topics to students. Trello was used when working with Teaching Assistants and Interns to assign them tasks under the To Do list.

Nearpod is a classroom tool for teachers to engage students with interactive lessons & assessments that students can access on any device. This is a great tool that can be used in K-12 and higher education classrooms to engage students in interactive presentations, collect and share student responses and tracking student understanding. It can be used for classroom instruction and assessment.

Google Documents includes a Voice Typing feature that can be used for transcribing audio and lectures. For example, a student with hearing difficulties can be provided transcripts or short lecture transcripts using Google’s Voice Typing feature. This feature can also be used by instructors in their online courses to provide transcripts of their audio or video lectures for accessibility purposes. Its accuracy is quite high which is great as a productivity tool as well.

Keywords:

Technology-enhanced learning.