TIM ANDERSON: Welcome to Tech Tips From Teachers.
On this episode, we'll be looking at student tool apps.
Our guest today is Kyle Brumbaugh,
from San Jose, California.
Kyle's been in education for 25 years,
and is currently the Director of Educational Innovation
and Information Services at a large Bay Area high school.
He also recently co-authored a book on classroom technology.
Kyle, thanks for joining us.
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: Thank you for having me here at Google, Tim.
TIM ANDERSON: How are you seeing technology
affecting learning for students and teachers in the classroom
today?
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: Well, it just really
has expanded over the last few years.
Technology and the number of technologies
that are available for students and teachers
has just exploded, really, in the last three to four years,
even.
Teachers now have access, and students have access,
to a variety of resources that they never
had access to before.
Really, the libraries of the world and all the information
in the world is accessible to them at their fingertips,
right at their desks.
TIM ANDERSON: Very cool.
And if we're thinking specifically
about those student actions like studying and note taking,
how is technology playing a part in those?
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: Well, there's so many apps
right now that really allow students
to leverage their study, or to make
their study more effective.
Some of the apps with flash cards or ways
to quiz themselves, or teachers to provide
quizzes as formative assessments so that the teachers can gauge
where the students are at.
And the students can gauge themselves
where they're at, so they know, really,
how to focus their study on what the things they need
to learn for that next task that they may take in class.
TIM ANDERSON: For student tool applications,
it's important that developers prioritize a few key things.
It's crucial that these apps can be used anytime and anywhere,
and it's important that they're highly customizable,
and allow students to collaborate with one another,
as well.
TIM ANDERSON: Why is it so important
that these apps can be used in a variety of places, variety
of circumstances, variety of times?
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: Well, you want to extend the learning
outside the classroom.
One of the benefits of having students with technologies
is that they can now use those technologies anytime, anyplace.
So I start to think of now that student who was maybe learning
something in a biology class, now
has the opportunity to, on their way home on the bus,
open their phone and go through a series of flash cards
that now will deepen their learning from what
they learned in class.
Also, at a high school level, one
of the big things that happens to a lot of students
is they miss some class because of athletic events,
or some other extracurricular activities.
Now, while they're on the way traveling
to some of these extracurricular activities,
they can actually study what they've been learning in class
or what they missed in class, because the teacher can provide
that content to them in a digital format that really
wasn't accessible just a few years before.
TIM ANDERSON: Definitely.
And then what about that customization piece?
Why is that something that's so important for these sorts
of tools?
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: Well, the customization piece
is really important because it actually targets the learning.
It takes the student, and really allows
the student to assess themselves,
or the teacher to assess what the student knows.
And so the teacher and/or the student
can target what they really don't understand, and spend
the time learning those skills, and then bringing them
into the whole so they really have an entire picture of what
the learning goals are, and what the learning outcome should be.
TIM ANDERSON: Very cool.
And then on that collaboration piece,
I feel like that's something that
is sort of a buzzword these days in education.
Why is that something that's so important
to integrate into apps?
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: Well, collaboration
is huge, because you want to allow
students to work together.
Because that's what they're going to do in the work world.
When they leave school, they need
to be able to collaborate with their peers.
They need to be able to work as part of a team.
These apps allow students to work as part of a team,
and because of that, they learn some socialization skills,
they learn how to divvy up the work,
or how to separate out the work.
But then bring it back to a whole
so that everybody has the same level of understanding.
Teachers can manage that process by assigning different roles
to different students.
But, at the same time, or at the end
when they have a culminating project,
the teacher can now assess the group as a whole,
and really be able to parse out--
which was one of the negative things
with collaborative learning in the past--
was that teachers really couldn't suss out
which student had done what.
Now, because of the way the tools are structured,
teachers can really kind of look at what students have
done as part of the collective.
And then what students know individually,
and not just what the group project presents out
to the entire class.
TIM ANDERSON: Let's take a look at some exemplar student
tool applications.
Kyle, first up.
Quizlet-- why is that such a strong student tool?
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: Well, Quizlet really
gives students and teachers the opportunity
to create that anytime, anyplace learning.
So a student could start off in the classroom using
Quizlet on a tablet, and then transition
from using that tablet to their phone out on the quad,
on the way home.
Virtually any place they want to use that application they can.
Teachers can actually set up some listening skills,
and some vocabulary just using the auditory components
of Quizlet.
Also, Quizlet allows teachers to create quizzes using images,
so that it can be more of a sight-recognition type of tool.
So there's plenty of different things
that they can do in Quizlet.
TIM ANDERSON: And what about Papyrus?
What makes that such a great app for the classroom?
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: So one of the things with Papyrus
is that it's really customizable, in that you
can go through, and you can change the colors,
you can change the pressure, you can change the thickness.
It really is responsive to the touch of the student
using the application.
Which is unique.
The other things that you can do with Papyrus
is that you can bring in content from other places.
For example, you could actually take a picture
with your phone or your tablet, bring it into Papyrus,
and mark it up or annotate it.
TIM ANDERSON: And then what about
with StudyBlue, what makes it such a valuable tool
for students?
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: So first of all, StudyBlue
has a wealth of information.
They have over 250,000 decks that users or teachers can
pull from, to really say, I want my students
to learn about this.
But the other piece with StudyBlue
that really makes it effective is that ability for students
to collaborate-- to create decks collaboratively,
and that they can now share those decks back and forth
with each other, and then share those, actually,
back with the teacher.
So the teacher can really say, if these students really
think these are the most important things,
I really need to make sure that I hit those things in class.
TIM ANDERSON: So there you have it.
For student tool applications it's
important that they can be used anywhere and anytime,
that they're highly customizable,
and that they allow for collaboration among students.
For more episodes, check out the Google Developers YouTube
channel.
Kyle, thanks for joining us.
KYLE BRUMBAUGH: Thank you for having me, Tim.
TIM ANDERSON: Thanks.
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