Cool Tools 4 School

Yesterday in college we got to play with technology. Not just listening to the teacher, but playing with tools! I really liked it, because now I could do something myself and the time was flying.

We were in groups of 3 and choose 1 category from the site http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/.  Within this category (our case drawing tools) we had to look to the different tools and find out how it works and see what the strengths and weaknesses are.  I already had one problem there. I didn’t had a laptop, so I got the iPad of the teacher. But there was one problem with the I-pad, most of the tools needed Flash player, so didn’t work on the iPad. If you think about education, giving all your students an I-pad isn’t really smart. Then there will be a lot of cool tools and games they can’t play. Thus my first conclusion of the day was: if you want to integrate technology in the class and use nice tools, don’t buy iPad’s but use normal computers or laptops.

Looking at the tools itself it was really nice. We found some nice tools to really easy build a house or make a word cloud. The other groups also found nice tools to practice the tables or making a photo presentation. One group found a real helpful one: dropbox. It is different from the other tools, because it isn’t something to learn from or play with. Even though dropbox is a really cool tool to use in school if you want to share documents. I also use it for my commission of the sport club, it is really easy and nice.

So what we found were a lot of different tools we didn’t know. I learned some new tools and learned there are more tools than I thought there would be. All the tools we found have a few weaknesses and are maybe not really appropriate for schools, but some of them are. And all the tools were really easy. For education this means teachers have to know which tools there are, so they can use them. I think most of the teachers don’t know all the possibilities and that’s why they aren’t using them. If someone can show them all the possibilities and show that it isn’t difficult to use, then they probably will use it in class. Maybe they can put it on the school page, so the children can play the games or use the tools at home. Than the teacher doesn’t have to use it in the class, but the children will still be able to use it. Some school in Enschede Zuid already have an internal school page were you can find games and tools the children can use in the free computer time they get at school. I think that’s a really nice way to use the technology and let the children play en choose themselves.

Oh and iPads are fun to use, but not really handy when you want to use tools that need flashplayer!