Tools for the Modern Teacher...

One of the things I have been contemplating whilst walking this educational journey, is how much effort goes into preparing a lesson(s) in order to ensure effective and efficient learning takes place amongst your students. Not surprisingly, teaching strategies, tools, applications and gizmos are now available in abundance in comparison to the days when using different coloured chalk was as dynamic and exciting as the teacher could get. Here are a few of the applications I’ve been introduced to that you may find useful.

 

Hot Potatoes,  is a freeware application that includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. It is straight forward and quite easy to use, and something that gives you a few alternative options for review, assessment and feedback gathering exercises.

Socrative, is a very useful and versatile application for evaluating and assessing how much your students know or can recall. A cloud based application, where a virtual classroom is created and accessed by students via invite code. I felt that this application was an excellent for getting instant feedback, as data is available in real time by the teacher. The variety in questionnaires and quizzes you can create online is good and allows for flexibility on the part of the teacher, who can amend and keep things relevant to the current discussion or topic. The instant feedback is very usefully for highlighting areas and/or specific individuals that may need additional help or attention.

Kahoot, is a very similar cloud application to Socrative, yet I felt that its lack of question type options and flexibility in design make this a more simplified version of Socrative. Can be useful for use with younger students, but I will probably be giving this one a wide berth.

Wordle is fun, exciting and very simple and easy to use. It is basically an online toy for generating “word clouds” from any text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and colour schemes. A fun way of providing key information to your students.