In this video, I'll walk you through the process of how to think strategically about the technology
tools that you bring into your classroom. This video is actually taken from my brand
new How to Teach with Technology Starter Kit, which you can access for free by going to
newedtechclassroom.com/starterkit. My name is Sam Kary, and this is my YouTube channel
for The New EdTech Classroom. The most common question I get from teachers is just how to
pick the right technology programs to use in their classrooms when there are so many
tools to choose from. So in this lesson, we'll be looking at how to select technology tools
based on the strategy that you're trying to put in place in your classroom. So again,
rather than starting by picking a tool first, we'll instead start with what we want to accomplish
and then select a tool that will help us achieve our goals. Learning which tools best align
with specific objectives of course takes time, and by far, the best way to learn is just
through experience and trying things out in your classroom. You can identify a strategy
that you want to put in place, like say increasing collaboration, and trial some different tools,
and then see whether or not they're actually helping you increase collaboration. There
are also lots of resources out there that can help you better understand which tools
are best aligned to specific goals. Of course, one of those resources is The New EdTech Classroom,
but there are also others like Common Sense, which I'll be showing you a little bit later
in this course. I'll walk you through how I approach choosing tools that align to goals,
so that you can see how the process works. So let's start with the first high-impact
area of need, to increase participation. Remember that for this area of need, we wanted to put
an active participation strategy in place. After you've identified your strategy, the
next step is to think about what you want out of a tool. So in order to put an active
participation strategy in place where students are doing things at all times in class, we're
going to want a tool that helps us ask for mandatory participation as opposed to voluntary
participation, a tool that allows for varied responses so it's not just students raising
a hand or talking as a way to participate, but giving them some choices, like being able
to draw or record audio, even record a short video response. And then I also want to look
for a tool that's relatively easy to implement so that the active participation can be frequent
and occurring at all times during the lesson. There are lots of tools that meet these criteria
and they can help us put an active participation strategy in place. And two suggested tools
are Nearpod or Whiteboard.fi. Nearpod would be a good choice if you need pre-created lessons
and if you don't want to deal with sending students out to lots of different websites,
because it's a self-contained program. On the other hand, Whiteboard.fi is a digital
whiteboard that allows you to give every student an individual whiteboard that they can use
to record responses, and then show those responses back to you. You might want to choose a digital
whiteboard program if you do a lot of direct instruction and just need to see really quickly
whether or not students are grasping the concepts that you're teaching. For the next area of
need, to increase academic achievement, recall that the strategy that we were going to put
in place was to chunk the content that we provided students and to embed checks for
understanding in that content whenever possible. So for example, instead of just reading an
article and then answering some questions about it afterwards, and maybe not finding
out whether those answers were correct until several days later, I would want a tool that
would give students immediate feedback so that they could check for themselves whether
or not they were understanding what it was that they were reading. Similarly, as a teacher,
I would also want access to that information so that I could analyze who was understanding
the material and who wasn't, which is going to allow me to do some targeted intervention
and ultimately use that intervention to increase academic performance. Two tools that are effective
for making content interactive in this way are Actively Learn and Edpuzzle. Edpuzzle
is an interactive video platform that has a lot of pre-made content, so when you present
educational videos to students, rather than having them just watch it from start to finish,
instead, you can have them watch an Edpuzzle video that has embedded checks for understanding
throughout the entire video. Actively Learn also has an interactive video feature, and
in addition to interactive video, Actively Learn also has a huge archive of texts that
are already interactive, and you can also customize those texts to add your own interactive
questions. In addition to nonfiction articles, you can also make short stories, poems, and
even entire books interactive, and you can upload webpage URLs to pull in a website and
make that interactive, and even upload PDFs to add interactive questions to those too.
If you're finding this video helpful, be sure to hit the Like button and remember that this
video is actually part of an entire How to Teach with Technology Starter Kit that you
can get for free. I put the link in the video description and in the pinned comment. You
can also get it by going to newedtechclassroom.com/starterkit. For the last area of need, to increase student
engagement, we're going to put a strategy in place to introduce assessments of learning
that have some real-world applicability that are meaningful and that are authentic. So
really we want to get students invested in the process of making a final product here
so that they will also be invested in doing all the learning pieces that lead up to creating
that final product. It's also important that we have some way for students to publish their
work if we're going to have them create something. So we don't just want it to be something that
they just give to the teacher. What I would be looking for in a tool here would be a tool
that is going to have some real-world applicability. It might be a tool that people actually use
in the real world to publish information, get the word out about who they are, to get
their message out into the world. And two tools that I like for this are Canva and Book
Creator. Canva is a program that will allow you to do all kinds of different creativity
projects with students like graphic designs, presentations, videos, there's a lot more
in there as well. You can get a free Canva for Education account, and one of the benefits
of using Canva is that it's a program that professionals use, students often know this,
they recognize the name, and that in and of itself can be a motivating factor. Also, of
course, when you teach students how to use a program like Canva, that has some clear
real-world applicability that transcends your individual classroom. And then a program like
Book Creator is also a program that real authors use to publish e-books, and you can use it
to have students make multimedia-rich digital books that they can then publish to a class
library. You can share those books around with other students, with parents, and they
can even publish those books in the real world, so again, it has that real world applicability.
There are all kinds of other creativity apps that you can bring into your classroom and
bringing these types of assessments of learning into your classroom is really a key factor
in getting students invested and engaged with the work that you are doing. So just to recap,
in this video, we looked at how to choose the right edtech tools based on looking at
the strategy you're trying to put in place, and then identifying what you would want out
of a tool. I gave you some ideas about tools that you might want to use to get started.
In the next lesson I'll also be showing you where you can go out and find tools on your
own that align to your particular areas of need. Thanks for watching this video to the
end. If you want to learn more about how to use education technology in your classroom,
be sure to watch that playlist above. And if you're looking for free resources, as well
as a free course to help you get started with teaching with technology, be sure to go to
newedtechclassroom.com/starterkit to get your free Starter Kit, as well as over 20 free
resources for you to take and use in your classroom.