Best of the Best: My Top 5 Tools and Apps

I found my previous lists of classroom technology from the past eight weeks did not seamlessly fit into my lesson plans for this assignment. It really made me think how exploring technology on its own when you're not currently teaching in a school has its pitfalls. Once you're tasked with a lesson plan and standard to meet, you start looking for technology that fits your needs rather than a technology that may work someday. 

In the end, though, none of the tools or apps I used in my lesson plans were entirely new to me. However, I did re-visit old discussion boards to get ideas from other classmates of technology I decided not to include in my annotations. So after creating a unit plan, my top tools and apps are...

1) Padlet: I get the hype from others in the class now. It's an awesome tool to get students collaborating. 

2) Socrative: It's a virtual exit ticket, but I used it in one of my lesson plans get students thinking about the topic and as a pre-assessment. I think it will be a cool way to grab students' attentions at the start of class and to make sure everyone is caught up before moving on with the unit.

3) Plickers: Same with Socrative, I used this as a pre-assessment rather than an exit ticket. As I learned in LBS 750 about the research process and checking in with students throughout their work, I think creating a questionnaire that checks in on students' feelings about how their research is going would work great with Plickers. 

4) Canvastera: I love Canva, but this is a much simpler app that allows students to just make posters with a limited number of graphics to choose from. 

5) MindMup: This is a tool I used in EDU 737, but the first time I'm including it in this class. I think it's a great tool to make spider maps and you don't need to create an account. It's easy to use, so I think it would be a great way to get students using technology to do something they already know how to using pencil and paper.

This week's image is a concept map I made for one of my lesson plans. It is step 8 in the SSU Lesson Plan Template (used for EDU 737). It was made in MindMup and I really get why the template has so many steps. It forces me to understand the standard and what I am trying to teach students.