Lewis,+Bobby+J-+Cool+Tools+Review

During my time at the New Literacies Institute I feel like I learned about several new cool tools for my fellow teachers and myself to use in our classrooms. The first and most universally useful tools in my opinion are Google Docs. Both during the institute and outside of it, I have learned how easy and practical that tool can be. And I especially like how some of our classes have encouraged its use in collaborative assignments. I spent the entire institute taking notes on Google Docs, because it is so easy to share the information.

My next favorite tool, and I know its not the most creative by far, but I like the concept of Symbaloo, it is such a great way to organize those bookmarks we use everyday such as emails, school websites, graduate school login pages, wikis etc. I know I’ve already started building mine and I want to try to build one full of the best cools tools we have learned about over the last several months. I think the rest of our staff could benefit an organized list of vetted tools. I am personally very fascinated with the idea of ePortfolios, what a great way for students to demonstrate what they know and learn. However, I’ve seen them done with PBWorks, Wikispaces and Livebinders, and the differences are quite great to me. Livebinder I think fails in comparison because of the narrow view window that is used to look at the binder. I think it’s an example of poor design, but their concept I think is well placed. I am personally fond of the PB Works, I think it has a few advantages, especially how it allows for imbedded pages and sites within its folder options. It’s a great way for me to have a demo site, included within my own personal ePortfolio from UNC-C. I also look at ePortfolios from the perspective that students should have the ability to demonstrate their work from every class in one portfolio, so I plan to encourage a working format for the school by the end of the first semester. In terms of Wikispaces, I think the institute presented such a great perspective on the collaborative abilities of wikis. Up until now, I’ve only saw them as one or two people delivering information, but NLI has showed how tons of people can collaborate on one site and leave the resources out there for the masses to learn from. And I think it has inspired us as a school to kind of step up our wiki game.

My group also embraced twitter during the institute, my principal especially loved how he could tweet updates on the school, our next challenge is just getting all of the students and parents following and we might be able to reduce our occasional “failures to communicate.” Just ask the stack of report cards setting on the secretary’s desk.

My final favorite take away from cool tools, is not so much the cool tool itself, but I really enjoyed how the institute included the use of the short video creations segments using the flip cameras, throughout the institute. It gave us an opportunity to showcase a few of the cool tools in ways similar to how our students would use them in class, and it helped break up the general routine of the institute which I appreciated.


 * Application Plan**

My plan to incorporate these tools is for the students to build themselves an ePortfolio. I am going to have the students build a site on PB Works, this will include a page that details all of the classes that they have taken each year in school. So a section for their freshmen, sophomore and junior and senior years, with all of their classes listed, I see the advantage for this structure being that if another teacher wants the students to create a portfolio in their class, all they will have to do is link a page to that class and not have to build a brand new site each time. See the example below.

On their ePortfolio I plan to incorporate a variety of different cools tools depending on the topic of course, so that they can embed them and show them to the world as their creations while also demonstrating the knowledge of the content.