The Web offers many tools that educators can use with their students to enhance creativity, assist with accessibility, increase student choice, and embed technology skills with their content knowledge. These tools are often free and user friendly and can be used to assess students knowledge and move students from simple recall to higher order thinking skills. Here is my review of four current tools that are very popular with educators.
FlipGrid is a student response tool that harnesses the power of video. Teachers can create learning communities in which students can post ideas and share responses to the teacher as well as to one another through the use of a simple code. Students are using the upper levels of Blooms taxonomy as they create their own video content in response to prompts, as well as analyze and evaluate their classmate's content. With regards to Dale's Cone of Learning, FlipGrid has students on the bottom of the pyramid as hey analyze, create, and evaluate. With this tool, students are doing, saying, writing. They are discussing ideas and processing content by synthesizing their knowledge and presenting it in original ways. The video tool requires students to be concise, and doesn't require a lot of technical expertise. This allows for collection of quick, on-the-fly responses, or planned, well thought out responses. Students must have a mobile device, however, and download an app by which to create and upload their videos. This could prove to be an obstacle to some students and classrooms.
VoiceThread, like FlipGrid, allows students to upload video, audio, and other media files, as well as annotate over and comment on the media. One major difference, however, is on the teacher management side. You have to upgrade your account in order to create "groups" (class space), so the free tool limits how you can collect the content from your students. A teacher using the free version would have to designate a single device for students to use one at a time in order to collect the media in one location. This tool could be of a great benefit for those teaching World Languages, however. It would be an easy way to assess student speaking skills such as pronunciation and accent. Depending on how it is used, VoiceThread could fall into the application part of Blooms taxonomy, right on up to the Creating part. Same with Dale's Cone of Learning - students could be demonstrating, applying, and practicing, or they could be creating, analyzing, and evaluating.
LucidChart takes advantage of drag and drop functionality for a collaborative diagramming experience. This tool is great for mind mapping, graphic organizing, and creating flow charts. It's primary an application/analyzing tool where students are modeling, organizing, and categorizing their learning. While this is in the low-mid range of Bloom and Dale, it could be used to bolster higher order thinking skills by having students justify their organization or combine information into new organizational models. While the free version does have limits, teachers and students can still collaborate easily with the use of a shareable link.
TES Teach, formerly known as Blendspace, is a digital lesson platform. Teachers can add a variety
of lesson components from worksheets to multimedia as well as interactive assessments. It is very versatile -teachers can upload original content or link to created web content. Lessons are easy to share and teachers can create classes by which students self enroll with a code. This tool would be essential to anyone following a "flipped" classroom model, as students can access content outside of the classroom and school hours. The simple assessment tool would allow a teacher to collect some formative data, though it's not very sophisticated - mostly multiple choice and polling-type questions. This tool is primarily on the lower end of Bloom and Dale, as it is primarily a content delivery tool. Students read, view, and hear information presented through text, images and videos. Students are on the recall and check for understanding levels for the most part. A creative teacher could find ways to move up the taxonomy/cone towards higher level thinking, but I did not see a way for students to comment or create through the tool itself. The tool could give instructions and point students to other sites through links to do their creating activities.
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