DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT INVENTORY
A useful exercise is conducting an inventory of the digital learning environment at your school or workplace. Below is an inventory done for the high school where I teach. If the document does not display on your browser, you can download the file below.
digitalinventory.docx | |
File Size: | 177 kb |
File Type: | docx |
DIGITAL LEARNING TOOLS
Here are a few of the digital learning tools that I have recently begun using with students:
Prezi is a presentation tool that my students have begun using. The interactive format of Prezi, which has very interesting and creative transitions between slides, has enhanced classroom presentations. It does not change the information, but it gives students an engaging way to organize and present their information. I have noticed that the unique format makes students more motivated to create and effective and interesting presentation.
Pecha Kucha is another presentation tool that I have found to be very effective with students. It limits students to 20 slides, each with a duration of 20 seconds. It is an extremely useful tool for helping students to improve their presentation skills because they have to be extremely well-prepared. It helps students to think about the organization of the information on a large scale and on the scale of each individual slide. The challenge factor has also increased student engagement, adding a "fun" element to giving a presentation.
Weebly is a tool that I use often for students to create their own web pages. I have found the program to be very easy for students to learn, with many options for formatting and personalization. I have also used Weebly to create my own web pages or examples of web pages for students. It is very user friendly and an easy way for students to create engaging and professional-looking web pages on a variety of topics.
Google Docs / Google Drive is a wonderful tool to use in schools. My students write papers and share them with me electronically, I can comment on their work electronically, they can collaborate with peers working on the same document from different computers or even different locations, they can create Google presentations which can be accessed online and shared online, etc. There are so many applications and students enjoy being able to keep many of their class assignments in one place.
Over the years I have come to see the value of using movie and documentary clips rather than the entire film. However, sometimes jumping from scene to scene can be difficult depending on the playback technology. I have started using iMovie more and more to edit movies and documentaries, pulling out the clips that I want to use, editing them together (with pauses between scenes if needed) and then converting them to MP3 files or making them part of a Keynote presentation. This has helped to make classroom instruction much more effective. Students at our school are also familiar with the technology as they sometimes edit their own movies shot on camera phones.