What's In The Toolbox?

Quick Guide To Online Learning Tools

@LisaBerghoff/@MrKimDHS

Now that our school year is under way and we've settled in as much as we possibly can given all of the excitement of working in a high school, it's a good time to think about our use of technology in our classrooms and to take an inventory of the tools we have at our disposal. The goal of any learning tool, digital or not, is to support learning. Sometimes it's a matter of increasing student engagement. Other times it could be a need to make materials more accessible. I recently came across this article that lists 5 Questions To Help You Make EdTech Decisions. Of course, your content and the needs of your specific students may lead you to add to this list, but these 5 questions are a nice place to start:

• Is there a tool to help check for understanding so that all students can share their learning?
• Have I identified open-ended creation tools that give students a space to create a product that demonstrates their learning?
• Will students be able to collaborate with their peers and work toward a common goal?
• Do these tools help students build transferable skills they can apply in a variety of contexts?
• Will these apps or websites work in the environment my students currently use (home, school, hybrid), and do they take connectivity, accessibility, and hardware into account?

Keeping the learning goals in mind, here is a quick and easy guide to what we have as a district for use in our learning spaces. 

Here is a rundown of the online products we pay for, along with a brief explanation of what they do. Feel free to book a time with me to explore more!

1. Edpuzzle

2. Hapara

3. Padlet (at HP)

4. Pear Deck

5. Schoology

6. Screencastify

7. Turnitin

8. Texthelp: Read&Write and Equatio

We also have premium (free to all educators) access to:

Canva

Flip (formerly Flipgrid)

There are MANY other online tools that offer fremium and/or free limited versions. 

A quick reminder about SOPPA:

The Student Online Personal Protection Act is a "digital privacy law that provides safeguards to protect the privacy and security of data about students when it is collected by educational technology companies. The Act is intended to ensure that sudent data will be protected when it is collected by edtech companies."   

We as a district need to account for the agreements we have with edtech companies and how data is collected and how it is protected. Any online tool that is used in our classrooms that utilizes the single sign-on ( Sign on with Google), falls under SOPPA.

Not sure if a tool you are using is SOPPA compliant? You can always go to LearnPlatform to check. If you are using something new, you can also request that it gets in the cue to be approved.