CMU reflection

1. Jennifer Chang Wathall
Date: 19th January 2017
Reflection for Module 2
Innovative Technology: What tools are really useful for online
collaboration?
When I looked at the videos posted this week there was very little that I thought
I could use in my own practice. My students use Khan academy at home but I
don’t use it as part of my instructional practice in lessons. I appreciate the
flipped classroom approach however I prefer to design my own inquiry led
learning experiences for students to learn about key concepts in math rather
than watch videos that tell them the concepts they should understand.
I tried a VR app called Layar last year and while the novelty of using VR apps was
fun, VR was not applicable in my classroom practice once again. So I chose to
research more about Google Apps for Education (GAFE). I don’t know any other
tool like it and to me it has the potential to really change how teachers approach
their instruction. GAFE encourages more student centred, collaboration among
learners and promotes a move away from the traditional direct instruction
approach. This spurred me to research about other online collaborative tools and
I found this list of 20 best tools for online collaboration here:
http://www.creativebloq.com/design/online-collaboration-tools-912855
This list includes tools such as GoVisually which allows you to annotate and
comment on any part of your project and Mindmeister which is a mind mapping
tool I have used before.
I have used wikis for participants in my workshops and this has proved to be
very useful for a three day workshop. I feel using a wiki with a class for an entire
year could get very messy if the wiki is not structured well.
While I enjoy reading some blog posts I cannot see how this would be useful in
my classroom as I would like the discussion to take place in the class. If I wanted
to facilitate an online course or my students did not have access to face to face
lessons with me then I think discussion posts on blogs would be very important.
Even though I say all of this I do find Kathy Schrock’s Guide To Everything
(http://www.schrockguide.net/edtech-blogs.html) and Educational Technology
and Mobile Learning
(http://www.educatorstechnology.com/search/label/google%20docs) quite
useful for myself as an educator. So I have changed my thinking this week! I do
think blogs can be very useful to inform me of up to date trends and tools in
educational technology.
I learned about something completely new to me this week: Seesaw. I will
investigate further and see if I can use this tool with my students when they are
creating their own online digital portfolios.