Are you and your students suffering from Zoom fatigue?
Here are some online tools to get you and your students collaborating while taking a Zoom break.
This quick reference guide is divided into three essential interactions for successful online instructional design:
Learner-instuctor
Frequent and in-depth communication with your students is vital in online learning. Interactions should include regular communication, robust formative assessments, personalized and constructive feedback, and timely intervention. The tools listed below support robust learner-instructor interaction.
Learner-content
The quality of interaction between your students and the content will affect how they construct knowledge and make meaning from what they have learned. The tools listed below can help you deliver dynamic content that can be customized to meet your students’ learning needs.
Learner-peer
Peer interactions help students establish their online social presence through instructional activities that require them to connect and work collaboratively. Developing an efficacious online social presence is crucial for successful learning outcomes within digital spaces. However, these interactions can be a challenge online—that’s why there are a plethora of apps and tools to check out below—from digital whiteboards to collaborative video editing!
Just hover over the icon, and a quick overview of the tool will appear along with the link to its website. Many of the tool/apps listed are free but may come with some strings attached—so be sure the read the fine print!
Learner-Instructor Collaborative Tools
Google Classroom
Giving feedback on assignments is a snap with Google classroom. You can leave personalized comments on student work and maintain a comment bank to store comments that you use most often. Students will view your feedback as comments after you return their work.
Floop
Grades 3-12
This a browser-based tool that provides students with digital, interactive feedback on their paper-based assignments. Students submit their assignments by snapping a photo of their worksheet or document and uploading it online. Students can see and respond to feedback instantly.
Formative
Formative is a web-based tool that allows you to create assignments, deliver them to students, receive results, and provide individualized feedback in real-time. You can create new assignments or upload pre-existing documents and transform them into paperless assignments.
Kaizena
Grades 6-12
Kaizena is a Google Docs add-on for feedback on student writing. With this app you can provide four types of feedback: audio messages, text messages, skills ratings, and lesson links. Students can also collaborate on documents and use Kaizena to give peer feedback.
JoeZoo
JoeZoo is an online summative and formative assessment tool that can enrich the feedback process between you and your students. JoeZoo is designed to work with Google Docs and Classroom, and it contains three main features: Feedback Tool, Rubric Builder, and Grading Tool.
Spiral
Grades 3-12
With this tool, you can quickly assess students’ understanding of concepts by asking open-ended questions and reviewing answers simultaneously. You can instantly prompt your students to improve their answers with one click, simplifying, and streamlining the feedback loop.
Learner-Content Collaborative Tools
Schoology
Schoology is an online learning management system (LMS) that allows you to organize curriculum, create lesson plans, and provide assessments. The LMS platform allows for peer collaboration and engagement through public or private discussion forums and cross-application.
Loom
Grades K-12
Loom is a screencasting tool that allows you to capture your computer screen and record yourself with your camera and can be used with both Mac and Windows computers. With Loom you can your videos and share on Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, as a URL, or embed it on a website.
Screencast-O-Matic
Grades K-12
Screencast-O-Matic is an online screen recorder that allows you to record, trim, edit, save, and share screencasts. You can produce screencasts with or without a webcam and choose from options that include adding a description, assigning to a channel, or password-protecting the video.
Actively Learn
Grades 4-12
Actively Learn is a reading platform for the web where students can highlight, annotate, and discuss texts as they read. You can assign texts to individuals or student groups enabling your entire class to read, annotate, and interact around texts at their levels. There are thousands of selections as well as the option to upload various texts. You can also monitor students’ progress by reviewing their notes and annotations.
Google Classroom
Google describes Google Classroom as "mission control for your classroom," while it is not technically an LMS, t's a platform that ties together Google's G Suite tools for you and your students. It is a digital organizer where you can keep class materials and share them with students, and it allows you to pick and choose the features you want to incorporate.
Edpuzzle
Edpuzzle is a video editor and an assessment-centered tool that allows you to edit and create interactive online videos by embedding either open-ended or multiple-choice questions, audio notes, audio tracks, or comments on a video. Video too long or you need to cut out a part? No problem--with Edpuzzle you can edit the video as you need. Edpuzzle interfaces with a number of websites including YouTube, TED, Vimeo, and National Geographic.
TEDEd
TEDEd is a platform that allows you to structure an assignment around a video. The lesson format consists of a lesson title, a written introduction (“Let’s Begin”), a series of multiple-choice or open-ended questions (“Think”), a place for additional resources to encourage further exploration (“Dig Deeper”), an interactive class discussion (“Discuss”), and a closing (“And Finally”).
Learner-Peer Collaborative Tools
Media and Presentation
Voice Thread
Grades K-12
A media and presentation tool where teachers and students can collaborate with voice, videos, or images.
WeVideo
Grades 4-12
WeVideo is a cloud-based video creation site that lets students create, edit, and share video content all in one place. It's a Chrome and mobile app that enables multiple people to collaborate on the same video from different locations. Additional features include green screen effects, screencasting, motion effects, exporting only audio to create a podcast, audio editing, and templates.
Mural
Grades K-12
This interactive whiteboard can be used as a reference tool or an interactive brainstorming workspace. It’s ideal for distance education and flipped classrooms. Students can collaborate and create their own MURALS from any device.
Explain Everything Whiteboard
Grades 1-12
This is a presentation tool where students upload images, text, video, and audio and collaborate in real-time. This app is available on Windows, iOS, Android, and Chrome OS.
Padlet
Grades 6-12
Padlet allows users to curate information onto virtual bulletin boards using a simple drag-and-drop system. Students can start with a template or a blank page and organize videos, text, links, documents, images to the wall. Profanity filters, comments, and voting features for more collaboration without the worry of inappropriate language. You can also moderate all posts or require that students display their names on the board.
Wakelet
Grades 6-12
Wakelet allows students to collaborate and save content and organize it in folders or wakes. You and your students can curate videos, images, links, and more. Users can add notes to each Item in order to tell a story, ask questions, or give directions.
Use the left and right arrows to view more categories.
An important note about technology integration:
Within the digital learning space, it is especially important that meaningful content and sound pedagogy drive technology integration. With a carefully balanced approach, these tools can help students achieve instructional outcomes when learning online. As you look over these resources, I encourage you to approach technology integration with a model to serve as your guide. For example, the SAMR framework is designed to help teachers integrate technology into lessons and to create rich and meaningful learning tasks.
Puentedura’s SAMR Model
REDEFINITION
Tech allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable
Transformation
MODIFICATION
Tech allows for significant task redesign
Enhancement
AUGMENTATION
Tech acts as a direct tool substitute, with functional improvement
SUBSTITUTION
Tech acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change
The four levels of the model, Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition are grouped into two categories: Enhancement and Transformation. Substitution and Augmentation are categorized as Enhancement meaning that the technology either replaces or improves the existing learning tools. Modification and Redefinition are categorized as Transformation meaning that the learning task would not be possible without the technology (Hilton, 2015).
The SMAR model is not a series of progressive steps, but rather a framework to guide your thinking about how to create rich and authentic learning tasks by leveraging technology (Kirkland, 2014). To determine the depth and complexity of technology integration, Puentedura (2013) offers a series of questions to ask yourself as you consider any app or tool:
The SAMR Ladder: Questions and Transitions
Substitution:
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What will the students gain with this new technology?
Substitution to Augmentation:
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Have I improved the learning process in a way that was not possible before?
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How does this app/tool contribute to my instructional design?
Augmentation to Modification:
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How is the original task being modified with the new technology?
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Does this modification fundamentally depend upon the new technology?
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How does this modification contribute to my instructional design?
Modification to Redefinition:
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What is the new learning task?
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Will any portion of the original learning task be retained?
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How is the new task uniquely made possible by the new technology?
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How does it contribute to my instructional design?
Adapted from Puentedura, R. (2012). The SAMR model: Six exemplars. Retrieved from http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/archives/2012/08/14/SAMR_SixExemplars.pdf)
References
Common Sense for Education (n.d.) Best Student-Collaboration Tools. Commonsense.org. https://www.commonsense.org/education/top-picks/best-student-collaboration-tools
Hilton, J. T. (2016). A case study of the application of SAMR and TPACK for reflection on technology integration into two social studies classrooms. The Social Studies, 107(2), 68-73.
Hunter, J. (2015). Models of Technology Integration: TPACK, SAMR and HPC. In Technology integration and high possibility classrooms: Building from TPACK. Routledge.
Kirkland, Anita Brooks.(2014) . Models for Technology Integration in the Learning Commons. School Libraries in Canada 32(1).
Moore, M. G., & Kearsley, G. (2011). Teaching and the Roles of the Instructor. In Distance education: A systems view of online learning, pp. 126-148. Cengage Learning.
Puentedura, R. (2012). The SAMR model: Six exemplars. Retrieved from http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/archives/2012/08/14/SAMR_SixExemplars.pdf)
University of Massachusetts Amherst (2020). Online Tools for Teaching and Learning. https://blogs.umass.edu/onlinetools/
Wei, C. W., & Chen, N. S. (2012). A model for social presence in online classrooms. Educational Technology Research and Development, 60(3), 529-545.