Educational Technology

Each year, I look forward to reviewing the results of Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools for Learning and to submitting my votes for a personal Top Tools for Learning list. I haven’t quite been writing up my list every single year (missed 2020 and 2023), but I did submit a top 10 list in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022. I avoid looking at the prior year’s lists until I have identified my votes for current year.

My 2024 Top Tools for Learning

Below are my top 10 Tools for Learning for 2024. The biggest change in my learning tools involves using social media less, most specifically that service that used to have an association with a blue bird and can most closely be associated with a cesspool these days.

Overcast

This podcast catcher is a daily part of my life and learning. Overcast has key features like smart speed and voice boost, which you can have for free with some non-intrusive ad placements, or pay a small fee for a pro subscription and have them hidden from view. Overcast received a major design overhaul in March of 2022, which led me to reorganize my podcast playlists to take full advantage of the new features.

Unread

While Overcast is for the spoken word, Unread is primarily for written pieces. Powered by real simple syndication (RSS), Unread presents me headlines of unread stories across all sorts of categories, which I can tap (on my iPad) to read, or scroll past to automatically mark as read. I use Unread in conjunction with Inoreader, which is a robust RSS aggregator that can either be used as an RSS reader, as well, or can be used in conjunction with an RSS reader, such as Unread.

LinkedIn

The biggest change from prior year’s surveys has to do with social media. The bird app just isn’t like it used to be. I’ve found most of my professional learning via social media takes place on LinkedIn these days. If you’re on LinkedIn, please follow me and the Teaching in Higher Ed page.

YouTube

Once I found out that I could subscribe to new YouTube videos on my RSS reader, Inoreader, it changed how often I watch YouTube videos. That, plus subscribing to YouTube Premium, which means we get ad-free viewing as a family, makes me spending a lot more time with YouTube. I even have my own YouTube channel, which I occasionally post videos on, most recently about my course redesign and use of LiaScript.

Loom

The expression tells us that it is better to show than tell in many contexts. Loom is a simple screen casting tool. Record what’s on your screen (with or without your face included via your web cam) and as soon as you press stop, there’s a link that automatically gets copied to your computer’s clipboard which is now ready to paste anywhere you want. I use Loom for simple explanations, to have asynchronous conversations with colleagues and students, to record how-to videos, and to invite students to share what they’re learning. If you verify your Loom account as an educator, you get the pro features for free.

Kindle App

I primarily read digitally and find the Kindle iPad app to be the easiest route for reading. I read more, in total, when I am disciplined about using the Kindle hardware, but wind up grabbing my iPad most nights.

Readwise

It is so easy to highlight sections of what I’m reading on the Kindle app and have those highlights sync over to a service called Readwise. The service “makes it easy to revisit and learn from your ebook and article highlights.

Canva

My use of the graphic design website Canva has evolved over the years. I started by using it to create graphics and printable signs for classes. Now I also use it to create presentations (which can include embedded content, slides, videos, etc.). For some presentations I’m doing in the coming weeks, I’m experimenting with using Beautiful.ai for my presentations. I still think Canva is great, but am having fun trying something new.

Raindrop.io

Probably more than any other app, I use Raindrop on a daily basis. It is a digital bookmarking tool. I wrote about how I use Raindrop in late 2020. I continue to see daily benefits with having such a simple-yet-robust way of making sense of all the information coming at me on a daily basis.

Craft

I don’t change my core productivity apps very often. In the case of Craft, once I made the switch, I never looked back. This app has both date-based and topic-based note-taking, as well as individual and collaborative features. From their website: “Craft is where people go to ideate, organize, and share their best work.”

Those are my top ten for the year, not in any particular order. The first draft of this post had eleven items, since I lost count as I was going. I wind up using Zoom as so much a part of almost every day, it winds up getting forgotten, given its ubiquity in my life. I'm leaving it on this post, even though it takes me over my count of ten.

Zoom

I use Zoom so often that one of the years, I entirely left it off of my top ten listing, because it is just always there. Recent enhancements I have grown to appreciate are the built-in timer app, the AI transcripts and summaries, and that you can present slides while people are in breakout rooms.

Your Turn

Would you like to submit a vote with your Top Tools for Learning? You can fill out a form, write a blog post, or even share your picks on Twitter. The 2024 voting will continue through Friday, August 30, 2024 and the results will be posted by Monday, September 2, 2024.

Dave and I had a great time celebrating passing the million downloads mark for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. Episode #250 invited people to call in to share a “one-in-a-million” episode that had a big impact on their teaching.

Show Notes: One-in-a-million episode

Thanks to everyone who contributed to the episode. If you would still like to share, feel free to email me or share your episode on social media.

Updated EdTech Essentials Guide

The EdTech Essentials Guide had a recent update, if you would like to download the most current version.

Recent Talks

Below are links to the resources pages for recent talks I have presented/co-presented.

• Advancing Women in Leadership Conference: Lead with Integrity Through Positive Politics (with April Akinloye)
• CCC Digital Learning Day: Create – Igniting Our Collective Imagination
• Hastings College Annual Faculty Development Day: Imagine – How Course Redesign Can Reignite Curiosity

Other upcoming and past events may be found on my speaking schedule page. My schedule is filling up for Fall of 2019, so get in touch soon if you would like to explore having me speak at your university.

Upcoming Interviews

We have some great guests coming up in the next couple of months, including: Maha Bali, Autumm Caines, Jose Bowen, Jared Horvath, and Natasha Jankowski.

 

This article originally appeared in Bonni Stachowiak's Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours Column on EdSurge. It is reposted here with permission. You can pose a question for a future column here.

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Dear Bonni: How can we make student-to-student interaction more personable and engaging in online learning? —Andrea Fuentes, Director of Online Learning, Doral College

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Cultivating an engaging environment can be a challenge when teaching online. Having the interaction occur among students, instead of solely with the professor, can be even more difficult.

Make it Easy for Students to Interact

It can be a delicate balance to try to not overwhelm students by the quantity of educational technology we use in a class, while still keeping things interesting through the element of surprise. The easier a tool is to use, the more likely students will feel comfortable engaging with each other.

As an example of the kind of tool that is easy to use, I was recently introduced to a brainstorming tool called Tricider (thank you Michelle Pacansky-Brock, faculty mentor for digital innovation at California Community Colleges). Tricider has us identify what crowdsourced decision we want to make, or what type of brainstorming we’d like to spark, and we are up and running.

Students can add ideas, pros and cons, and vote on items. The instructor can decide if you want to let anyone who has the link be able to collaborate, protect your ideas with a password, or require people to set up accounts before they can engage.

This is just one example of a tool that makes it easy for student-to-student interaction without requiring much effort from instructors to set it up. A few others that are simple to use include:

•  Padlet: a virtual corkboard that students and instructors can use to post text, photos, and links
•  Dropbox Paper or Google Docs: these mainstream collaborative word-processing tools let instructors invite students to collaborate on assignments or group work.
•  Trello: a virtual stack of index cards where students can add their ideas. All of these tools can be embedded into the learning management system your school uses, so students never have to leave their familiar environment in order to participate.

Rethink Discussion Boards

We need to rethink discussion boards if they are ever going to be worthwhile. I am afraid that students’ experiences in classes they have taken in the past may be ruining the format for everyone.

Students tell me that when they encounter a discussion board, they expect to see a long discussion prompt from the instructor with some questions they are supposed to answer in 300 to 400 words. Then, like clockwork, they will be required to respond to three other students’ posts within the same thread.

They learn to check the box—but they do not find themselves engaging in beneficial interactions with others in the class. Instead of reminding students of these past experiences, try rethinking discussion boards and having students be surprised by the richness of the dialog.

One way I have been experimenting with a different approach involves using the peer grading function in the Canvas LMS and setting up student-to-student interactions that way.

This past semester, each student submitted reading notes as an assignment in the LMS. I asked every participant to include in their responses:

• five takeaways from the chapter
• three specific ways they could apply the learning in their lives
• one question they had for others who read the same chapter

Then, I designated two peer reviewers for each submitted reading assignment and asked that reviewers respond to the takeaways and ways the learning could be applied, and to provide an answer to the question that was posed by each of the two people they were connected with via the peer review feature.

The students said they far preferred this method of interaction over discussion boards. They liked that the system automatically linked them to different people they might not have otherwise shared ideas with. The ease with which these pairs were established was appreciated by all—including me as the professor.

The only thing that was cumbersome on my end was grading student participation since there wasn’t a way to include scores within the peer review framework on Canvas. However, the slight increase in manual processes made it totally worth it as I observed their virtual conversations with each other.

Discuss via Video

Another way to get students talking with each other in different ways is to have them use video or audio to interact.

FlipGrid is an easy way to pose a question and have people respond via videos. It can be used within many of the most widely used LMSs, so students do not have to set up a separate account on FlipGrid or navigate to a different place.

Another tool to engage with video is a video platform from Arc Media, which can be integrated into the Canvas LMS. Instructors can upload a video or post a YouTube link within Canvas to your Arc library. Then, they can include that video in a Canvas course and have students interact with the video, by typing comments in real time as they are watching it.

My students watched some of Michael Sandel’s videos from his Harvard University course: Justice. I posted the YouTube link into Arc and it allowed us to have a private conversation on Canvas about the questions he posed. What made it different was that as Sandel posed a question to his class, I had my students respond at the moment he asked the question using Arc.

VoiceThread is another tool that allows for the kind of real-time interaction that Arc Media affords, except that you can post more than just video for annotations from others. A student could comment that he was confused about a concept at the precise moment that the idea was being discussed. Other students could help out by explaining how they understood the topic and possibly by providing an example.

Those are just a few tools I have found helpful for facilitating student-to-student interaction using video. Each time I have, students have noted how much more they prefer this kind of interaction over traditional text-based discussion boards.

Introduce Social Annotation as a Means to Engage

Writer, teacher, and Harvard Ph.D. candidate, Clint Smith III, recently professed his love for purchasing used books on Twitter. “I really enjoy buying used books because you get some small insight into how someone else experienced that book before you. Every highlighted sentence, underlined passage, circled word, & dogeared page is like being part of a book club with a stranger you'll never meet.”

I really enjoy buying used books because you get some small insight into how someone else experienced that book before you. Every highlighted sentence, underlined passage, circled word, & dogeared page is like being part of a book club with a stranger you'll never meet.

— Clint Smith (@ClintSmithIII) January 2, 2019

As I read Smith’s words, I imagined the power of discussions taking place in the margins of books across generations. As a person who primarily engages in reading via digital devices, I get to participate in a version of this kind of history showing up in the margins when I am reading a digital book. I can set the Kindle app on my iPad to indicate what passages many others have highlighted in their books and know what portions of the text have resonated with other people.

Hypothes.is is a social annotating tool that takes these reading practices to a whole new level. When reading on the internet, you can select text and annotate it. These notes may be shared publicly or saved privately.

The Marginal Syllabus project is just one example of the power of this type of collaboration. The project’s aim is to gather teachers together to discuss equity in educational contexts. As they describe on their website, “The Marginal Syllabus hosts and curates publicly accessible conversations among educators that occur in the margins of online texts via open web annotation.”

Here’s an example of Hypothes.is in action.

On the left is an article that the group participating in the 2018-2019 Marginal Syllabus have read. On the right are individuals’ comments and notes. Hypothes.is stays running in my web browser all the time, and I can see an indication of how many annotations there are on any page that I might want to browse.

Hypothes.is is not as easy to use as the tools I mentioned earlier. However, the service offers a Quick Start Guide for Teachers and have plenty of ideas for how to make use of Hypothes.is on their educators page.

The role of a teacher is more than presenting concepts and having students present those same ideas back to us at some future time. By having students engage with each other in classes, the richness of the interactions increase and the learning deepens. Make student-to-student interaction more personable by making it easy for them to engage with each other, rethinking discussion boards, and using video for conversations.

A student asked if he could talk to me after class. I said absolutely, wondering about the serious tone of his request. His tendency toward humor was nowhere in his question.

After class, he told his story clumsily. He clearly felt awkward at confronting me with my own apparent missteps. He had been watching my pencasts with loyalty, but was experiencing something at the end of each video.

After hearing my voice and seeing the beautiful images I had drawn in the pencasts (cough, cough… I draw only slightly better than our six year-old does), he kept seeing very inappropriate videos show up at the conclusion of each of my videos. He said that my suggested videos were showing up on everyone’s computers and he thought I would want to know.

I thanked him for telling me and assured him that I would look into it. I found it curious, since my YouTube browsing history would be highly unlikely to show scantily clad women in sexual poses.

Instead, my current YouTube “prescriptions” include things like:

• Stand By Me | Playing For Change | Song Around the World
• Yoga Quick Stress Fix – 5 Minute Sequence
• A new Randy Rainbow Song Parody: Rudy and the Beast
• Samantha Bee’s Mission Migrant Children Update Act 1
• Don’t Let’s the Pigeon Run This App (our son has now discovered that YouTube has these pigeon books on it and I let him watch a couple the other day)
• How to Make Big Marble Run Machine from Cardboard

Those recommendations make sense to me, based on videos I have watched in the past (or my kids have watched). However, the descriptions of the kinds of videos the student was describing didn’t seem like any kind of viewing habits that YouTube would have ever seen from me or my family members.

Those of you with a better understanding of YouTube’s algorithms already know how this story ends. I discovered that the videos that showed up after my students watched one of my pencasts had nothing to do with what videos YouTube recommends to me. Instead, they have to do with the person watching the video’s viewing habits.

I let the student know that maybe his roommates had been watching inappropriate videos on his computer, or somehow YouTube had decided that these were the kinds of videos he enjoys watching. I let him know how to fix his history and start fresh with the suggestions YouTube was making.

The other thing I did was make it a more habitual practice to uncheck the box when I embed a YouTube video that says:

“Show suggested videos when the video finishes.”

My story is super tame when compared to the ones shared in The New Yorker and tweeted about by zeynep tufekci. There’s a lot more to do than just checking off one more box. However, if it helps us avoid having students think that we are recommending videos to them that are actually coming from their own viewing habits, I think it is worth it to try to spread the news on this small step.

In writing this post, I linked to a pen casting blog post I wrote to help people make their own and realized that the video on that page wasn’t embedded correctly (the setting was not unchecked to show suggested videos when the video finishes). So, when I got to the end of the pendcasting video, this is what I saw as the recommended videos:

My “personalized” recommendations all made sense for that video, except for the one in the lower left-hand corner:

• Everything You Need to Make Educational Videos… More or Less – even thought it was from 2014, it still seems quite relevant to today
• Must Have Teacher Apps! – More geared toward K-12
• How to Make a Pencasting Video – This one is from Brandy Dudas, who was on Teaching in Higher Ed episode 153 and it isn't surprising that YouTube thinks I would love to learn even more from her
• 35 Unbelievable Cooking Hacks – Not sure how on earth this got recommended to me, as I am not much of a cook

While YouTube can be a good option for hosting videos we want to use in our teaching, the recommendations that come at the end of each video are more suited to serve YouTube's business needs than they are our students' ongoing learning. I hope this post reminds you of a most important checkmark to uncheck when embedding YouTube videos and keep the attention on the next part of their learning within your class content. 

Your Turn

What other guidance do you have for when embedding YouTube videos to help our students have a better viewing experience?

One of my colleagues tried out open-ended polls for the first time the other day. I asked him to let me know how it went, if he had time afterward. Here is his [edited] reply:

“I ended up using PollEverywhere in three of my classes yesterday.  It seemed that students enjoyed the interactive nature of the review session. However, there were some challenges.

I did the open-ended polls for the review questions. Initially things went pretty smoothly; however, in both of my intro classes there were one or two students who anonymously posted unhelpful responses (i.e. YouTube links, comments on NFL, etc.) as the class progressed. It was fairly distracting for other students.

In the future, I’m thinking that I may need to assign an identified “scribe” for each group and only allow them to post their group responses. The upper division class did a good job staying on topic.”

His reflections reminded me of another person who had shared about her poll responders going rogue. She teaches classes of 200-300 and had a bad first experience using open-ended questions, as well. She had left the open-ended question showing on the screen as the students worked on the case. After about 20 minutes, it was a free-for-all for who could come up with something to type that would elicit the most laughter from the room.

Here are some ideas for how to have a better experience with polling, specifically with open-ended questions.

Incorporate Polling Early in a Class

In both cases where polling didn’t turn out to work as well as the professors had hoped, they had started using it in the middle or at the end of a 15-week semester. This is not to say that you couldn’t ever make that work.

However, my experience is that especially as our Spring semester draws to a close, the students are often ready to be done about 2-3 weeks before the semester has actually ended. Bringing in a new teaching approach might bring new energy during a challenging season. However, it also might bring out the temptation to destress though distraction.

By using polling earlier in the class, you can set some group norms around how you will use them and be able to establish more familiarity with the method. I typically use polling the first or second class session, with the majority of the questions posed being in multiple choice format, or as a clickable image.

Present a Puzzle or an Opportunity to Predict

In Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do (2004), he stresses the importance of giving students problems to solve that are intriguing and even beautiful. When he was on Teaching in Higher Ed, episode 36, he asserted that we should:

“Ask engaging questions that spark people’s curiosity and fascination that people find intriguing…”

James Lang’s Small Teaching (2016) describes the power of having students make predictions. He suggests, “When presenting cases, problems, examples, or histories, stop before the conclusion and ask students to predict the outcome.” I enjoy using an episode of Planet Money about Brazil’s wild currency fluctuations and pausing it partway through to ask students what they thought the economists recommended to create more stability in their economic system.

Both Bain (2004) and Lang (2016) stress the importance of heightening learners’ curiosity. If they are being asked to wrestle with something that truly has their attention, they are much less likely to want to share the highlights of last night’s NFL game.

Lang shares about research reported in Scientific American where participants were asked to indicate their level of curiosity. The more curious they were, the more likely they were to remember the information being presented. The combination of curiosity plus the anticipation of receiving an answer created a wonderful combination to maximize both attention and retention.

Go with It

Depending on the nature of what is being entered into the open-ended prompt, consider enjoying the opportunity for some levity in what can all too often be a stressful season.

I followed Stephen Brookfield’s recommendation of using a backchannel service called Today’s Meet and kept it open as I played a couple of segments from a This American Life podcast episode about entrepreneurship.

The first segment profiled Asia Newson, an 11 year-old who was making her mark in business through her sales abilities and dynamic personality. She referred to herself as Super Business Girl and had even crafted an addicting theme song for herself that still gets stuck in my head each time I remember it.

I had asked the students to note when the podcast episode discussed any of our learning objectives and to make those connections on either Today’s Meet, or visually on a large piece of paper I had hung on the wall (this technique is often called Chalk Talk). Side note: I’m not sure what possessed me to think that having both options was a good idea, but I likely would only offer up one mode of collective note taking in the future.

Before I knew it, someone in the class had entered the Today's Meet back channel with the name Super Business Girl. The class burst out in laughter with each additional line that appeared. Eventually, a Super Business Boy came on the scene. The two interacted with each other and had us cracking up each time either name was mentioned for the rest of the semester. I could have been frustrated by the ‘distraction.' Instead, I was grateful for the memory we shared as a class. Each time I have done this exercise with subsequent groups, I always hope maybe one of them will show up again. 

Stephen Brookfield shares about a fictitious character he often brings into his teacher who he calls Shannon. This individual argues with Brookfield about controversial topics, in the hopes of getting the students to feel comfortable expressing diverse views. Shannon also provides Stephen with ways he could have approached something in a better way. The students all know that Shannon is not a real person (and that it is Brookfield bringing this character into existence).  

Limit the Amount of Time the Open-Ended Poll Stays on the Screen

Probably the most powerful way that I have found to keep open ended questions’ responses more targeted is to limit the amount of time the poll question is left “open” on the screen.

I usually present the question on a slide (not a live, polling slide). Then, much of the time, I will have students discuss their answer with someone near them. Finally, I will bring up the live polling slide on the screen and ask students to respond to it on their devices. If I have done an effective job at creating a mystery, or asking them to solve an intriguing question, I very rarely have any answers that don’t relate to what we are discussing.

Use a Tool that Has a Moderating Feature

Many polling and audience response systems that I am familiar with have the option to moderate responses on their paid plans. I haven’t used moderation much in my teaching, but can imagine that I would need to assign that task to someone in the class. I doubt that I would be able to multitask that effectively, without slowing down the class considerably and losing people’s attention.

Have Names Be Public

If you use a paid plan for PollEverywhere, for example, you can require that students’ names be included with their responses. I am not a huge fan of this option, as it can create unwanted pressure for the students to perform in cases where there is a right/wrong answer. I want these opportunities for review in class to be low stakes and having students’ identities not be known is one of the ways I accomplish this.

Stephen Brookfield stresses the importance of anonymity in his teaching philosophy. His fictional character Shannon isn't the only anonymous person who enters his classes. He suggests that all students use nicknames in their backchannel and uses this same practice when presenting at conferences, as well. 

There may be reasons why having your students' names be public makes sense in your case. However. I have yet to see this feature anywhere but on paid polling systems.

Check Your Power

I find it important to reflect on why it bothers me so much when students do certain things. I remember vividly how personally I would take cheating, which I talk about on episode 19 with James Lang and on episode 157 with Phil Newton.

I have yet to take it personally when a student types something distracting into an open-ended poll question (it usually makes me laugh; they can really be quite amusing). But, that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t regularly use a dose of checking my own sense of power in my teaching.

When presented with students who are typing in text that doesn’t align with our plans for the class session, it can mess with our desire to have things be in control. Let’s get real and admit that probably should have been stated as our desire to be the one in control.

Handing control and agency over to our students can be challenging and exhilarating all at the same time. This semester I had options in the syllabus for students to do reviews for our exams. One of the requirements was that they involved the students in the class in some way and didn’t just present from a powerpoint. Seeing them take more of a shared responsibility for the learning that needed to take place in the class was delightful.

Having students give presentations in a class is an activity that probably requires its own post, since there are plenty of ways we can mess this up, as well. But, for now, realize that reflecting on those elements of our frustration are the result of losing control can be helpful in identifying remedies that will ultimately facilitate greater learning in the future.

Tools

I mentioned PollEverywhere in this post, as it was ultimately what I recommended to this colleague, based on the time he had and the goals he was looking to accomplish. Here are a few tools I have found particularly helpful at presenting poll questions:

• Glisser – This is a tool I use more when I am presenting keynotes or workshops at conferences. It allows you to present your slides within their system (you upload your slide deck to Glisser), deliver poll questions, and has a whole host of other options that you can toggle on/off.
• Sli.do – Present live Q&A and polls in events or classes. Again, I tend to use this one more at conferences, instead of in my classes, but you certainly could use it.
• Plickers – If you want to do away with devices completely, Plickers are for you. You print out Plicker cards and students use them to indicate their answers. No open-ended questions for these cards, but I did want to include them here, if you are particularly adverse to having people use their devices.
• PollEverywhere – One of the things I really like about PollEverywhere is all the different types of questions they offer. It is also great how easy it is to embed PollEverywhere questions within a slide deck, meaning that I don’t even have to toggle over to a separate application. Ah yes. One more thing: I like how I can administer a PollEverywhere poll without even a projector. I was once locked out of my classroom. We went out by a beautiful fountain on our campus and were all able to go through the PollEverywhere questions via my phone or tablet and with the students responding on their phones.
• Kahoot – More on the playful side, “Kahoot is a game-based learning and trivia platform. It is restricted to multiple choice questions, but thought it was worth including here.

Other tools I have heard good things about, but haven't tried myself include: TopHat Classroom, Socrative, and Mentimeter. 

Don’t forget that you can use sticky notes, place review terms in envelopes and use all sorts of analog methods of reviewing information in a class. The more we can mix it up in our teaching, the more likely we are to combat some of the apathy that can come our way.

Your Turn

What’s your advice to someone who struggles with students typing in distracting items into an open ended polling question?

References

Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do*. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: everyday lessons from the science of learning*. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

This American Life (2014, September 5). 533: It’s Not the Product, It’s the Person. Audio podcast. Retrieved from https://www.thisamericanlife.org/533/its-not-the-product-its-the-person