Jodie Taylor
With the many 1000s of educational apps on the market, staying up-to-date with learning technologies can be a time consuming and bewildering process. So consider this list a tiny attempt at elevating some of the confusion surrounding teaching with technology for tertiary educators, particularly those working in the arts and humanities sector. All apps and services listed below are free to use or offer free versions with some user restrictions.
THIS LIST HAS RECENTLY BEEN REVISED TO FOCUS ON TOOLS TO ASSIST TEACHERS WITH THE RAPID SHIFT TO ONLINE DELIVERY ON THE WAKE OF COVID-19.
Source: https://drjodietaylor.com
Padlet can be used to complement activities that require students to discuss ideas during or outside class time, bring their own point of view, share content and show how they work through problems. The ability to capture, store and share this information in a variety of formats can help students reflect on the learning journey and provide academic staff with valuable qualitative information.
Padlet can be used for:
Seamlessly make your images, videos, and 360 content interactive with text, links, images, videos and over 70 call to actions, creating memorable experiences for any audience
AnswerGarden is for anyone interested in using an easy and powerful way to get brief feedback from a group. AnswerGarden is used by teachers to establish the knowledge level of a class on a certain topic. It is used at conferences and workshops to break the ice with the audience in a fun and interactive fashion. AnswerGarden is used by creative teams for digital brainstorming sessions. People who maintain websites and blogs use it to poll their visitors in a brief and to-the-point matter.
Flipgrid is where social and emotional learning happens! The leading video discussion platform for millions of PreK to PhD educators, students, and families.
Empower student and teacher voice by making it easier than ever to listen to each other and build conversations in bytes. Podcasting makes voice more convenient and approachable than ever before. Use it to support student podcast projects, foster collaboration by voice, provide opportunities to reflect, present evidence of thinking and more. If you want to discover how you can use Synth check out https://medium.com/gosynth/the-synth-educator-blog-series-ed6bacff28fd
H5P empowers everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content - all you need is a web browser and a web site that supports H5P.
GroupMap is an online brainstorming and group decision-making tool that dramatically improves the output of team brainstorming activities. Try it free. Start from over 60 brainstorming templates, or design your own. Our templates include Agile Retrospectives, SWOT, Urgent Import Matrix, Perceptual Maps, Stakeholder Analysis, Risk Assessment, Mind Maps, the Business Model Canvas and many more.
Simply put, Educreations is an interactive whiteboard app that allows you to create easy to follow tutorials for students. You can record audio to narrate your actions as well, allowing you to create diagrams, commentary, simple animations, or instructions with coupled audio covering any topic. Plus, you can share video via email, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to the classroom.
Twiddla is an Online Whiteboard for the Modern Classroom. Mark up websites, graphics, and photos, or start brainstorming on a blank canvas. Voice and Text chat too!
MindMup 2 - Mind Map in the cloud. Store unlimited mind maps for free. Zero-friction, free online mind mapping. The most productive online mind map canvas on the Web. Supports Freemind mindmap import/export. This tool is integrated with Google Apps and enables the user to take notes and access ideas anywhere as this is an online tool. Maps are edited in real-time and team documents can be connected.
Webjets allows you managing any kind of information with ease.
Place cards freely, or group them at the speed of thought. Any content collected from the web automagically turns into an interactive card. Use drag and drop, a bookmarklet or even IFTTT to push your data into Webjets.
The new Adobe Spark suite includes Adobe Spark Video (formerly Voice), Adobe Spark Page (formerly Slate), and Adobe Spark Post (which was just Post before). For iOS and web, lets you quickly design nice-looking images for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or your own blog with a handy selection of presets. Pick a size, color palette, and title themes. You can also choose from ready-made templates to design videos and web pages. Spark will guide you through each step, doing all the heavy lifting behind the scenes. Most of the themes are stylish and modern, which gives it a leg up over most of the competition. It also allows a lot of flexibility, if you want to avoid making a cookie-cutter image just like everyone else using the same app. On iOS the app is split into three parts for posts, videos, and web pages.
Make any video your lesson by trimming and adding questions to increase engagement.
You and your team already collaborate on documents, project planners, CRM’s, and learning management systems. With Loom, any video you record can be watched directly where it is shared.
Create flowcharts and diagrams online with real-time collaboration. This a very useful tool in a wide variety of academic disciplines, and being able to collaboratively edit them makes Cacoo a powerful application. Here’s a link to learn about and access their free Academic plan: https://cacoo.com/lang/en/academic.
XMind, a full-featured mind mapping and brainstorming tool, designed to generate ideas, inspire creativity, brings you efficiency both in work and life. They offer Fishbone Chart, Matrix, Timeline, Org Chart, not only visually organizes causal relationships among complex ideas/events, but also makes the in-depth comparative analysis possible, tracks milestones and schedules in chronological order.
A clear way to share complex information. Coggle is a collaborative mind-mapping tool that helps you make sense of complex things. Create unlimited mind maps and easily share them with friends and colleagues.
Flippity is a series of web apps that can easily turn a google spreadsheet into a set of online Flashcards or Quiz Show. There are cards for helping a teacher create random groups, or mix and match activities. Students accomplishments can be tracked using the Badge Tracker and the Certificate Quiz.
Planboard makes it simple to get organized and reduce your classroom prep time. Accessible from anywhere, you can plan lessons, align to curriculum sets, and manage your schedule with ease. Best of all, it’s free for individual teachers. Easily create lessons in the intuitive online editor. Add in attachments, photos, and videos to bring your lessons to life. Then build lesson templates to cut prep time even further so you can get right into your instruction.
Stormboard is a slick new service designed for hosting collaborative online brainstorming activities. Stormboard allows you to create an unlimited amount of "idea boards" or Stormboards with up to five collaborators on each one. Each of your Stormboards can include sticky notes, images, videos, drawings, and word documents. Moving items around on your Stormboard is a simple drag and drop process like the one you may have used on services like Padlet. Each item that you add to your Stormboard includes a commenting option that your collaborators can use to give you feedback on your ideas. Currently Stormboard is offering free plans to educators: https://www.stormboard.com/main/pricing_edu
Experience the power of the #1 visual collaboration platform to create, collaborate, and centralize communication on a single online whiteboard. Facilitate collaborative activities with tools like voting and timer to make your classes more time efficient. Use it to Share feedback, provide reviews, and gather student opinions. You can add audio-visual content and embed boards in your LMS.
Kialo is the platform for thoughtful, respectful and rational debate, empowering reason through friendly and open discussions. Explore popular debates, practice critical thinking, create your own discussion threads and invite others to participate. Among many features, Kialo also allows you to visualise the discussion from different perspectives and vote on perspectives that make the most impact.
Clipicious is a powerful collaborative knowledge vault for you & your team. Collect, Organize, Annotate & Share Knowledge. Manage all your learnings effortlessly in one single place. Read more about ways you can use it in educational contexts here: https://clipicious.com/use-cases
Transforming media into collaborative spaces with video, voice, and text commenting. Upload, share and discuss documents, presentations, images, audio files and videos. Over 50 different types of media can be used in a VoiceThread.
SpiderScribe is an online mind mapping and brainstorming tool. It lets you organize your ideas by connecting notes, files, calendar events, etc. in free-form maps. You can collaborate and share those maps online!
Dr Jodie Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Media & Cultural Studies at SAE Creative Media Institute, Brisbane. Through the lens of critical pedagogy, Jodie’s praxis-orientated approach to educa...
