Tools to enhance learning

My keynote presentation at TeachMeet Soton last night included a whole host of different tools to enhance learning. The tools fell in to two categories. Those that were web based which can be accessed using browsers and those that are iPad App based. There were a few Apps that I didn’t get to show due to time but I’ve included those in this post for you to have a look at too.

To kick off with I set the scene with a great video that I was put on to be the great Dawn Hallybone.

This was to showcase how the young people we work with today aren’t like us. “Video killed the radio star” might have been relevant to us when it was the first video shown on MTV. Things aren’t quite the same any more!

I then showed a piece of art work a student of mine recently created on his iPad put to music. Watch it. It’s simply amazing.

Then I moved on to a presentation which talked about teacher confidence, teachers needing to have a growth mindset ala Dweck and means to support this, namely Digital Leaders. I moved on to talk about how scaffolding from taxonomies such as SAMR could help with that and talked about wins in the classroom which are the ideas below, following the embedded PDF of the Keynote presentation:

TMSoton

These were the tools and Apps I went on to demonstrate for quick easy wins for supporting teaching and learning.

Web 2.0 Tools

Socrative – awesome AfL / questioning tool

Isle of tune – great fun whilst being creative and teaching logic skills

Instagrok – a great way to search, particularly for research

Visuwords – a visual dictionary

Audioboo – great place/way to share podcasts for your own school radio station

Quietube – remove everything from YouTube except for the video to make a nice clean viewing experience

Again but slower – Wikipedia for those with literacy and learning difficulties

Tagxedo – for brilliant automatically shaped word clouds

Psykopaint – for recreating your own works of art using brushes in the style of famous artists such as Cezanne or Van Gogh

Clevr – for stitching together photos

Tag Galaxy – amazing interactive image search with fantastic results from Flickr

Primary Games – a site with lots of games for primary with an educational slant

Information is beautiful – a site with some simply beautiful infographics

Pinterest – for finding brilliant resources and inspiration, including infographics, for your subject area – more here

Infogr.am – for making your own infographics. Great for Numeracy

Piktochart – probably the best infographic maker on the web

Easel.ly – another fab infographic creator – look great, simple to make / use

Smore – brilliant flyer/magazine/web site learning tool – great uses, such as Jon Tait’s Teaching & Learning magazine

Check this – similar to Smore, great for creating web pages for multiple purposes. Simple to use.

Padlet – used to be Wallwisher, a great online corkboard for sharing ideas. Can also be used on iPad to add videos/images too. Download a PDF of the wall for further sharing – example here

Beqrious – for making lots of different types of QR codes of varying colours

Visulead – free visual QR code maker – more on it here

Thinglink – a great website for embedding tapable/clickable resources within the actual image. Super for supporting/demonstrating learning

 

iPad Apps

Here is the first screen of apps that I showed. I had some more screens to go through too but time didn’t allow. I’ve included them below too.

Screen two

Screen three

 

I hope you find these of use! You can access a list with direct links to each of the Apps shown above from a website list here too http://bit.ly/TeachMeetSotonApps

If you like these or use them anywhere, I’d love to hear from you!

Thanks!

Mark