Technology in the Classroom: 3 Tools to Get You Started

A big push in education right now is the use of technology in the classroom. For some people, this is a new and exciting time to be a teacher. For others, the idea screams out for early retirement or a career change. Either way, if you are wanting to keep your students engaged and you want to increase the amount of learning going on in your classroom, you will want to integrate technology into your classroom beyond the “Replace” stage of the RAT model. If you are an instructional designer or an online educator, you may be looking for new ideas to implement into your courses. This post exists to give you a few ideas of what you can do to get your students using technology in the classroom. These ideas are great tools to use for formative assessments in any classroom environment for all ages and content areas.

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Technology in the Classroom

Another really great reason to use technology in the classroom is how easy it is to differentiate your lessons. With so many different kids in our classrooms, in the classroom as well as online, we have no choice but to create a personalized aspect to much of what we plan for each day. Technology takes a lot of the time and work out of differentiation. It can be easily changed to meet the needs of our lower end kids, our higher end kids, as well as our special education and ELL kids. The ease in which this is done is a huge advantage!

Using Polling Tools to Formatively Assess Students

After you give an awesome presentation about your topic of the day and after a little bit of practice together, you want to know if the students really understood what you were talking about. Did any of that information sink in? If you use a polling tool to create online poll questions, you can instantly ask questions and get feedback from every student n the room. Within minutes, you will know if you need to continue covering this topic a little bit more, if there are some areas they understood, but others that are confusing them, or if they are ready to move on to the next topic. Have you ever used “Fist to Five,” where students hold up a fist for 0 and up to 5 fingers, with five fingers being complete understanding and a fist being completely clueless to show how well they believe they understand a topic? This is a fun tool teachers have used for years, but it can be flawed in that first, you only get the students’ own perception of understanding. They could actually be completely clueless, but think they are experts and hold up five fingers. They could also misrepresent themselves by holding up more fingers than they truly believe they should because they are too embarrassed to admit they don’t understand. With a polling tool, you do not have to worry about these kinds of problems. You can see what questions most of the students got correct, which ones show signs of struggle, and some of these tools actually give you graphs to visually see what you need to know. Students feel more comfortable answering the questions because they know it is anonymous, and you can see if your lower end kids or your ELL kids are getting it without the rest of the class being aware, and you can adjust accordingly. The best part? If you prepare these questions ahead of time, you can have the questions, answers, and analysis all completed faster than if you chose to write them up on the board and have the kids turn it in. That doesn’t even include the grading time that you can complete erase from your schedule! Awesome, huh? I thought so too.

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Click on the image to get started with Poll Everywhere!

There are tons of polling tools and quiz tools. Survey Monkey, Google Forms, and Poll Everywhere are three tools that come to mind. All three are incredible tools that make your life so much easier! In the video below, I show you how to get started with Poll Everywhere. If you have Google Classroom, try out Google Forms! It is so simple and easy to figure out and learn, but if you want a tutorial on it, please tell me in the comments section and I can do one and post it right here on Instructional Design by Kelly!

PowToon Brings Creativity and Learning With Technology

There are teachers in every school that seem to know so much more about technology than everyone else. Their students are always doing these amazing projects with the computer or tablet, and it boggles your mind where they found the time to learn how to do these things. Well, chances are, they are using a web tool much like PowToon. There are so many web tools and apps out there that make it so easy for us to engage our students in outstanding projects that look like they take incredible amounts of training to learn to teach, but in reality, only take about 5 minutes. PowToon is a web tool that allows students to make a cartoon presentation as a slide show or as an animation video. It is really fun, easy, and a great way to assess a topic without a quiz. Students can work on their own or together in groups. You can differentiate the assignment just by changing the grading rubric or by giving different students different topics to create a comic for. You can make more complex requirements for your higher end students, and basic requirements for your lower end students, and you can allow your ELL students to use whichever language they wish to create in. The possibilities are endless! In the video below, I will show you how to get started and some of the more basic options you can show your students. There are also tours and tutorials that can teach you a lot about the web tool and how to use it, so you should feel perfectly comfortable using it right away.

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Click on the icon to get started with PowToon!

A Blog is a Great use of Technology in the Classroom

Setting up a blog is really very easy! Wordpress and Blogger are two of my favorite platforms for setting up a free blog. You can have your students sign up with their own account in about 5 minutes. The blog can be used in many ways to check for understanding. First, you can use it to meet your Common Core ELA standards in any content area. There is a real push to get kids writing, and writing well. Having their own blog where they can use their own creativity to create online is a great way to build up student engagement and to get them writing. You can use it just for the reason of getting them writing, or you can use it to get them writing and to test for understanding in your content area on a weekly, or even daily, basis. If you are a content teacher, you can have your students write about a topic that pertains to whatever topic you are currently discussing in class. For instance, if you are a math teacher, you can have your Geometry students write about how the Pythagorean Theorem is used by people in everyday situations. If you are a history teacher, you can have your students write about daily life for a teenager during the French Revolution in a 1st person perspective. If you are an elementary school teacher, you can have your students write about three things they plan to do over the weekend, or write five sentences about anything they are interested in. I have four children of my own. My oldest is in 4th grade and just started a blog of his own, and is writing about superheros, movies, and video games. My 3rd grader is a brilliant child when it comes to analysis and hands-on activities, but when it comes to spelling or writing, he needs some extra help. I had him stat his own blog where he has written about our dog, video games, and other topics that he is thinking about that day, and his writing has started to really improve. After he writes his post, he and I will go over each sentence and make any necessary corrections. I explain why something is wrong and how to fix it, send him on a research mission about reading and spelling rules, and help him formulate sentences. He has gotten better and better after each post. And the best part? Neither kid realizes that I am having them do extra practice for school! They are both really excited to post to their own website and then check back the next day to see if anyone made a comment, liked their post, or to add another post that they had been thinking about. Technology in the classroom can be fun, and that is what makes it such a great learning tool. The kids have fun while also picking up essential skills along the way.

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Click here to get started on a free WordPress Blog!

To differentiate your blogging lesson, you can do so many different things. You can grade all their posts with a rubric, and just use a different rubric for those kids that need an alternative assignment. You can allow ELL kids to write in their native language, and then you can use a translate tool to read what they wrote. You can come up with several topics for the kids to write about,making some of the topics more in-depth, some of them a bit easier to write about, and some of them could involve video, images, or drawings in place of written text. These are only a few thoughts. There are many other ideas that can be used as well.

The video below will explain how to create a blog and get you and your students started:

Final Analysis

These tools are just a few of the hundreds of examples that are out there for you to use and take advantage of when trying to integrate technology in the classroom. Over time, I hope to show you how to use many more of them, but these three are great ways to get started. While they can be used in many ways, they are excellent formative assessment tools that can be used to check for understanding while also having fun and getting your students fully engaged in what is going on in your classroom. PowToon and Blogging taps into their creativity, and the polling tools can allow you to let you students use their phones in class without getting into trouble! If you would still prefer they not, though you can have them use the messaging tool on their tablet or the web browser on their computers, and they are still pretty excited! Kids love using technology, but they are not as well versed in it as we thought they might be. By allowing technology in the classroom, you are also showing them that it can be used as a tool for learning and creating, and not just for entertainment and research. You are also able to differentiate using technology in the classroom without anyone being the wiser, and without spending hours trying to come up with a complex lesson plan that reaches all the students. What more could you ask for?

Interested in other great web tools? Check out Cool Tools for Schools! There are enough tools on this website for everyone to find something useful. It is amazing!!

Now that you have completed the tutorial in regards to technology in the classroom, let me know if it was helpful! If I was able to help you all with these three tools, I will be happy to do more with others! Please take the poll below…it is a web tool called Poll Daddy that allows you to embed a poll right into a blog or website!

Kelly

References

Pixabay (2013). [Image of classroom and laptop]. Retrieved from: https://pixabay.com/en/computer-classroom-learning-103577/