Tools of the Trade Augmenting
Pedagogical theories have their place, but they’re not always compelling for the teachers who are in the trenches. They might be especially suspect for someone who’s been around the academic block and has seen trends come and go. Take Claudia Lyons, long-time French teacher to generations of Deerfield students. Lyons has watched the technology conversation ramp up on campus, and while she’s had computers in her classroom for years, she also has concerns about the tradeoffs of the newer machines. Her first response to the iPad was . . . chilly. “‘I’m not going to have my kids with their heads down, looking at screens,’” she recalls thinking. “Language is between people.” But Lyons gamely took an iPad home with her, and as the weeks and months ticked by, she started to explore its terrain. Did she end up incorporating it into her classroom? No, not exactly. And yet it did make an impact on her teaching, because as she explored it, she discovered technology she could use elsewhere. “The iPad was essentially a gateway into doing more without the iPad,” she admits. Lyons’s French Honors students now use a program called Collaborize Classroom, and she’s assigning projects to students using PowerPoint or a presentation app called Prezi. “For example, I put my French 4 students in pairs to do a project that required them to research Paris and two other French cities. Then, they were told that they could present their ‘travels’ in PowerPoint or Prezi. What they chose allowed their creativity to shine: They embedded videos, voiceovers, and clips that they had made,” says Lyons. “The happy result? The students learned about the culture of their cities, they learned how to navigate in them, and they learned how to create a presentation that was more than a series of photos/images.” But, crucially, none of this was at the expense of human interaction, Lyons says. “They had to talk to each other during the presentations,” she points out. “There was also plenty of face-to-face conversation going on, too.”
Loopy
loopyapp.com This app lets users create layered loops of music just the way a DJ would. Ever create a little mnemonic jingle to help you remember declensions of a particular noun? Now you can do it with style—and embed it into an ebook that you might have created with . . .
Book Creator and iBooks Author itunes.apple.com/us/app/book-creator-for-ipad/
Once upon a time, a student would have compiled all his or her knowledge through typed term papers. For decades, the only thing that changed was the typeface—depending on whether it was written up on a manual typewriter, electric, dot-matrix printer, inkjet printer. Now ebooks are here, democratizing the self-publishing world—and upping the ante on a student’s homework.
Edmodo
edmodo.com Just about every teenager you know is on some form of social media, right? If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em—and create a shared educational space that allows for extra teacher/student interaction in a context that feels very familiar, in a good way.
Prezi
prezi.com/prezi-for-education It’s not enough to do the work; you also have to be able to present it to others in a compelling, fresh way. Applications like Prezi also help create more student interaction—not only with the teacher, but with one another, as everyone is brought together onto the same page.
Collaborize Classroom collaborizeclassroom.com
This web-based educational platform gives teachers an online space that they can individualize to their own specs, allowing them to continue class discussions after class is dismissed— and then pick them up where they left off the next morning.
deerfield.edu
37