iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Below, you will see a breakdown of the 4 C’s. These infographics are located in Google Slides and they are yours to take for free. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m all about “teachers give teachers”, so steal away. All I hope is that this can help educators provide a greater depth of learning in their lessons to students. It’s cheesy – but that’s worth a lot more than money.

The Internet is full of useful information … and it’s getting fuller every day. The struggle these days isn’t finding enough information. It’s knowing what to do with it when we find it.

That’s curation.

Students can act like museum curators, finding the best and most representative pieces to add to their collections to share with others.

It’s an important life skill, too. As they get older, knowing how to gather, organize and make sense of useful bits of information will help them be more productive and efficient.

We can now communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime through the simple click of a button, and it is our job as educators to leverage these collaborative tools in the classroom. Many schools are finding creative ways to incorporate blended learning in their curriculums, and THINK Global School, where I teach, is no different.

Due to our focus on blended learning and travel, it is imperative that we remain as paperless as possible. Technology can often make or break our experiences as we study in different countries around the world, so we must hit the ground running during our seven-week intensive country visits. And depending on how they are integrated into our teaching toolkits, the tools used for our blended learning units can either help or hinder our student learning experiences.

Like you, we’ve tested our fair share of tools in trying to make the digital collaboration process with our students as seamless as possible. Some have worked incredibly while others not so much. But there are five that we’ve ended up going back to time after time–tools that just make student collaboration online (and thus blended learning) that much easier.

When Google began Project Oxygen, they assumed the best predictor of employee success would be university program and grades. Instead, the top of their list was, “being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues.” In other words, the most critical factors for success involved collaboration. Later, when they studied their teams in Project Aristotle, they found the top skills were, “equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, empathy, and emotional intelligence.” Again, these were the soft skills most closely aligned to collaboration.


But how do you actually do this? How do you create projects that boost collaboration in a K-12 environment?

Over the last few days, I’ve tried out dozens of writing platforms, cloud-based and locally installed. I’ve downloaded apps to my devices, played with features, wondered at how each tool might change the how of my work and also the shape of the work itself.
I found a handful of tools I’m going to recommend here. Most work well for collaboration. Not all of them allow for the kind of dynamic synchronous writing sessions that Google Docs enables. What I found is that testing tools and thinking through their features forced me to ask questions about how I do the work of writing and how (and where) I want to do that work going forward. These are in no particular order. (Except you can skip to the end if you want to see the tool I’m using to write this post.)