Day 13 - EdTech Tools

Day 13 of the Reflective Teaching 30 Day Blogging Challenge

Name the top edtech tools that you use on a consistent basis in the classroom, and rank them in terms of their perceived (by you) effectiveness.

I don't use a lot of EdTech tools the classroom, partially because I ensure that the tools that we're using help to aide the goal, and are not tech being used solely for tech's sake.

Here are the ones that we use consistently:

iPad (Keynote, Pages) - We're a 1:1 school, so we have an iPad for each child.  We use these for research, presentations, writing, etc.  We have some apps, but there are few that we use consistently. 

Twitter - We use this to communicate with parents and our school community as well as the greater world.  We have a child tweet each day (in an ideal world) to give a summary of our day.  We also tweet with other classes, authors, other people we're interested in communicating with (Craig Kielburger from Free the Children, etc).

KidBlog - I like to have the kids do some of their written work on KidBlog, particularly opinion pieces or journal writing. I'm trying to fit this into our schedule more often often, as it takes some time for the kids to learn how to use this tool.

Wikispace - We use this primarily for events like Global Read Aloud, to connect with other classrooms.  It's a fun tool!  In conjunction with this, we might use things like Lino It or Animoto.