Post date: May 23, 2013 5:50:18 PM
A teacher might wonder sometime, “If I am not using the most modern technology to teach a class with, am I really an effective teacher?” Try tapping into your favorite search engine for “edtech” to find a non-stop flow of links on the term from profit and nonprofit organizations, and magazines, and even doctorate degrees, and on and on, now focused on educational technology.
So to smartly facilitate learning with technology, teachers might logically conclude that they must remain at the forefront of edtech knowledge by using the next and best piece of edtech available. They could spend hours every day scouring the web for the right tech tools to improve their classes, trying them out themselves before finding a way to fit this into their lesson plans and engaging students.
But just in case computers crash or the internet goes down, being stuck with merely a book and your subject knowledge has worked fine for teachers for a long time before the edtech became a thing. Good teachers can always be effective. Teaching is an art, not entirely unlike standup comedy, but one where teachers create an environment where learning is scaffolded and students take responsibility for improving their knowledge.
Back to the point, the purpose of edtech should be to improve the process and the end result of education, engaging students and teachers because they find the process fun, helpful, and intuitive, not just using technology to meet a requirement.
I teacher recommends finding resources where people are already recommending tried and tested resources for you, like an art curator might. Based on my limited time searching the web for some data to include with this article, I found many teachers out there blogging about the next best resources obsessively. I like checking out www.scoop.it for topics sometimes. Those curators probably all get together and practice using edtech at meetings on the weekends, like witches in some teacher cult....or maybe just at school staff meetings.
“So go ahead and recommend something already!,” you might be thinking. Well I liked using edmodo as a learning management system(LMS) with my students. Students would request that I post a quiz for them sometimes. I did surveys to confirm that the majority of them wanted these timed online take home quizzes. Of course then I had to get one up there ASAP, not to let them down. It came recommended to me by some good teachers. Other teachers in our school were drawn into using it naturally, because the students were asking them, “why don’t you use edmodo too.” It was free and intuitive to set up and use, and made life easier while connecting my classes with each other and online quizzes and assignments. Total quiz results combined automatically on edmodo.com, making graphs to tell me which questions I needed to go over with students during class.
Before typing up this article I made an LMS shortlist, very short, based on what I considered to be some of the more useful ones, for my current employer in China. You might want to settle on the one you are most comfortable with, or one that you and all the other teachers in your school agree to use. Connecting with other teachers online can also be useful. And then all the students will not have to switch between a different LMS per teacher, at least mid-semester.
Chart Data: from company official websites and crunchbase.com profiles as of March, 2013, except: moodle date from wikipedia; interface appeal is author's opinion from watching current video presentations for each LMS, and personally using Instructure as well as edmodo for high school Environmental Science classes
My current employer went ahead with Instructure’s Canvas, due to; ability to be customized, testing capabilities, full course downloads/transfers, and a few other powerful options offered by Instructure.