TechTools for Teaching and Learning

Peer review is an integral part of many courses, and students learn a lot from evaluating the work of their peers. Unfortunately, setting up a peer review system has its challenges: It’s not easy to teach students how to give each other effective feedback. It’s also difficult to hide student identities, making truly unbiased feedback hard to accomplish. And if you have a large number of students, keeping track of who has given feedback to whom can be frustrating and time-consuming.

Peergrade takes care of a few of these issues. Originally created for use at universities, it’s a platform where students can evaluate each other’s work anonymously. After the teacher creates an assignment and a rubric, students submit their work. Next, Peergrade randomly distributes the assignments to different classmates for evaluation. Students give feedback to their classmates using the rubric set up by the teacher; they can add written comments as well as selecting options from the rubric. Finally, students can view the feedback given to them; they can rate the comments as helpful or not, and even flag problematic comments.

Kahoot! is a handy tool that students can use to create in-class questionnaires and quizzes. This is handy for obtaining data for graphing assignments, data for research essays, and feedback from their classmates. Kahoot! is compatible with multiple devices and has a game-like feel that will help keep students interested.

Because so many students (and teachers of course) are in the habit of multitasking, a good skill to teach them (and yourself), is how to organize and streamline their assignments. Trello is a free and super easy-to-use tool students can use to create workflow charts. Multiple students can be added to the same board; great for collaboration on projects.

This is a tool for teachers, to help assess students’ understanding of concepts and their engagement with the material. Teachers can project questions onto their screen using while students answer them in real time. Students’ answers show up on the teacher’s phone screen, and teachers can see which students got answers right and which didn’t. This gives teachers an accurate picture of how students are following the information, and adjust their lessons accordingly.

Presentations are a core part of the curriculum but let’s face it, PowerPoint isn’t terribly engaging. Prezi allows students to create presentations that are more creative and exciting than was PP has to offer. Not only will this make the presentation creation process more interesting for students, it will also making watching presentations more interesting as well. Plus, Prezi presentations are published publicly on students’ accounts, so their classmates can access them later to check their notes.

This is a fun tool to make the classroom more enjoyable through gaming. Students make their own avatars, gain and lose points based on classroom behavior, discussion approaches, and other soft skills agreed upon by the teacher and the class. Teachers can also use Class Dojo to take attendance and create graphs that breakdown the information for teachers. Not only will this tool encourage students to uphold class values, it will also provide key metrics to help teachers adjust their teaching tactics accordingly.

Picture you and your students in class. Every one of you has an iPod or other tablet. You open up a PowerPoint presentation and it appears on every student’s tablet, with you controlling the pacing of the slides from your tablet. So far, it already sounds like a pretty nice way to keep students more focused because they can all see it equally clearly.

But then imagine adding more interactivity: An open-ended question students can respond to right on their tablets. A poll. A quiz. A drawing activity where students sketch or diagram something. When students respond on their tablets, you see the results on your own.

Wiki's are an amazing tool, both for a teacher personally and for his or her class. The ability to share information and grow information with a wiki is truly wonderful. And since a wiki can be sorted by page topic -- rather than by date (as with a blog) -- it makes it a very powerful tool to use.

PowToon is the world's leading, most user-friendly and most intuitive animation software. With PowToon, anyone - even if you don't know a pixel from a proxy server - can create engaging, animated videos with a professional look and feel. Our greater vision is to bring a touch of awesomeness to everyday communications.