This week, we bring you three tools that supplement learning with game mechanics - including one that requires learners to physically get up and run around! - and three tools that aid instruction by making it easier to make, view, and share notes and social media messages.
Enjoy these new additions!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
It has only been a week since launching our groups feature and there are already some interesting discussions taking place. I would like to take a moment to share a few of them.
It is great to see so much activity happening already! As always, if there are ways we can improve, please let me know. Thanks!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
Whether you’re looking free educational materials or handy tools to help make your lessons more fun and engaging, you may find this week’s highlights helpful.
Enjoy these new additions!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
We’ve been sitting in classrooms, shadowing district ICT/tech integrators and coordinators, watching teachers use edtech, running research surveys, and think we see some common patterns:
With those in mind, we would like to introduce our latest feature: Groups!
As a member, you can create a new group, such as “High School English Teachers” or “ICT Professionals.” Then others can join your group and start topics such as “Best apps for behavioral management,” “What do I need to record video lessons?” or “How can I strengthen the wifi signal in my classroom?”
This is much like an online community or forum. It is meant to help you get qualitative information on education technology that a search on edshelf might not be able to answer. While we grow our database of websites, mobile apps, and desktop software, we know that sometimes the best sources of information are other educators like yourselves.
We only have barebones features right now. More will be added in the coming weeks.
What do you think? To start, introduce yourself to the rest of the community!
Photo by hoyasmeg
I tried to add up all of the educational videos on services like YouTube EDU, YouTube for Schools, TED-Ed, Khan Academy, Teaching Channel, National Geographic, Discovery Education, PBS Teachers, and many, many more. I stopped around a billion. And that’s not including all the MOOCs out there.
I could do the same for lesson plans, digital textbooks, or research articles, oh my. However, I’m not a masochist. There are probably millions, nay, billions of such educational materials out there. Some are good, some are bad, all are floating around out there in the cloud.
How do you, as an educator, find exactly what you need?
You can use a generic search engine like Google Search, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Those are great places to start. But sometimes you need something that can dig deeper, something that can shake out more of the dirt to find the gems.
Here is a list of tools you can use. They range from education-specific search engines to content curation services, or a hybrid of the two. With these tools, hopefully you can find that perfect piece of content.
Oh, and there’s one more. It doesn’t help in the search process, but can help once you’ve completed your research.
What tools do you use to help you find good educational materials?
mumeditation Asks:
edshelf Said:
Hi Gabe,
If you are looking for some kind of tool where learners can use mixed media items, here are some ideas:
Are these along the lines of what you were thinking? If you had something else in mind, let me know and I can offer some more suggestions for inspiration. Hope this helps!
Science, electronics, programming, and math geeks will like this week’s highlights.
Enjoy these new additions!
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
Photo by mortsan
Technology: 1) The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry. 2) Machinery and equipment developed from such scientific knowledge.
Education Technology: The use of technology to improve education.
We are at the crest of a new revolution in education technology. Educators know this. If you’re not an educator, you’ve already seen it if you have school-aged children, seen an iPad at a friend’s house loaded with education apps, or heard of the Khan Academy.
This revolution is expanding exponentially. And that’s a good thing.
Once considered a niche market, it is now one of the top 5 “prominent technology trends expected to influence the consumer electronics industry in the years ahead,” according to the Consumer Electronics Association. That’s huge. Apple reported that 1.5 million iPads were in use by educational institutions and schools in January 2012 and Google announced that Google Apps for Education had more than 20 million users in October that same year. A prominent technology trend indeed.
To be fair, there has always been technology in education. Education technology is nothing new. Scantrons in the 1970s. Overhead projectors in the 1950s. Or even counting boards and abaci as far back as 300 BC.
But this latest revolution is different. How? It is made up of three characteristics:
I’ll explain in more detail.
Remember playing Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand on an Apple II? Or looking through Microsoft Encarta on a CD-ROM? If you grew up in the 80s like me, you do. That’s Dark Ages now, compared to Minecraft, Mangahigh, and Wikipedia.
Education software is moving from the desktop to the cloud. This means the data, and oftentimes the applications themselves, can be accessed in a variety of devices: laptops, tablets, smartphones, etc. All that is needed is an Internet connection. The software and data no longer need to reside on a CD-ROM or, gasp, floppy disk (anyone remember those?). They can be streamed to you from clusters of servers using cloud computing technologies.
This leap is huge. Without the need to purchase expensive desktop and network software, as well as their subsequent upgrades, schools can gain great cost savings.
This doesn’t mean schools will completely abandon the client/server model, however. Some network infrastructure may be necessary for sensitive data, such as student information systems - though modern SIS packages are also transitioning to the cloud.
In fact, UC Berkeley discovered that they will save $75M annually by switching their email and calendar providers to the cloud-based Google Apps for Education. Its competitor, Microsoft Office 365, has seen K-12 school districts save anywhere from $100k-400k annually in IT costs. That’s not chump change.
Another benefit: instantaneous updates. Since the software exists on remote servers that software developers control, they can push the latest and greatest features to you as soon as they are available. Not just functionality, but content as well. Is there an incorrect fact in that educational game your student is playing? The developer can fix that right away. Data can be fresh, real-time, and up-to-date.
Educational content, such as lesson plans, textbooks, and even lectures, are becoming digital. This allows content that is physically-bound, such as textbooks, or geographically-bound, such as classroom lectures, to reach wider audiences.
A lot has been written about digital textbooks. Advantages, disadvantages, and the complexity of the whole debate.
However, the outlook for digital textbooks appears positive. US Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged the nation to go digital. “Over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete. The world is changing. This has to be where we go as a country.”
This is already happening. In a study by Bookboon, nearly 60% of college students polled prefer digital over paper textbooks. Pearson found comparable results; in their survey, 70% of college students and 58% of high school seniors use digital textbooks. Both numbers are up from the same study performed a year ago. And more than 60% believe digital textbooks will replace paper textbooks in the next five years.
Even Pearson’s CEO Peter Cohen says, “A seven-year-old textbook is kind of a silly idea. It just doesn’t make any sense in this day and age. Having printed instruction programs fixed in time doesn’t allow us to modify them so students get the most up-to-date work.”
A similar change is happening with classroom lectures. Although the flipped classroom model has been in use since the turn of the millennium, the much lauded, yet controversial Khan Academy has pushed the practice into the spotlight and may have played a part in its growth.
Educational videos are also a major component of the MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). This trend was embraced by a handful of notable universities and independent organizations such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX, all of whom are founded by professors from those same notable universities (Stanford, Harvard, and MIT). So fervent is this trend that the New York Times called 2012 The Year of the MOOC.
Unlike digital textbooks, MOOCs aren’t performing as well. They’ve gotten fantastic enrollments, over a hundred thousand in a few cases. Unfortunately, pass rates are low. Some courses have reported anywhere from a 5% - 14% pass rate. It’s possible those numbers are skewed because the novelty of MOOCs is attracting a lot of onlookers, most participants don’t anticipate the difficulty of the courses, or they aren’t able to maintain a level of engagement that traditional classrooms can.
Supporters argue that MOOCs are free and provide students that with materials that they otherwise might not have been able to get because of geographic or socio-economic factors. As one educator says, MOOCs should “disregard the dropouts and celebrate giving huge numbers of people access to free, high-quality, education.”
Where cloud computing and digital content enable edtech to be accessible on any device, mobility means devices can be accessible anywhere. Such as the classroom. A movement that’s been spreading across schools and universities is BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).For cash-starved schools, this may represent real cost savings. Oak Hills Local School District saved $1.27M with their BYOD and virtual desktop program. Not bad. Others also report positive results, leading at least one educator to write a book on this movement.
There are benefits outside of the US as well. In countries like India, where there are more mobile phones than toilets, the availability of educational content can be life-altering to a family living in poverty. With this access, entire new worlds are open to them, even with minimal to no instruction.
Another movement that is gaining traction is the 1:1 movement, where schools roll out one computing device per student. Some pioneering schools, like Mid-Pacific Institute and others, are already sharing their best practices with others. Not all schools can afford such a luxury, but those that can are providing valuable lessons that others will be able to adopt later.
With the eager help of corporations like Google and Apple, devices are proliferating in classrooms. Google reports more than 500 US school districts using 1:1 Google Chromebooks and Apple cites about 1.5M iPads currently in use at educational institutions and schools. Ebook readers like the Amazon Kindle are also gaining a presence. All of this still represents a small fraction of the schools and universities in the US, but it is trending upwards.
Previous generations of edtech were none of these three. I’ve never tried to put an overhead projector in my pocket, but I have a feeling it would be difficult. And I’ve already touched upon the client/server model and CD-ROMs, both of which are characteristics of the previous edtech revolution.
This new revolution is about portability and accessibility. It is about ubiquity, or close to it. There are still questions about access. The digital divide, no matter how you define it, is very real and very troubling. But a Khan Academy video is still a step easier to access than a CD-ROM. We are at least heading in the right direction. And that’s a good thing.
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
gjmueller Asks:
edshelf Said:
Thanks! I’m glad you liked this! :)
We recently ran a survey to find out which technologies are currently used in education and which technologies are most in demand. The goal was to identify gaps in what educators need vs what educators have. The results were very enlightening.
A few thousand of you responded. The majority of the respondents were public K-12 school teachers. The second largest group were university educators from both public and private universities.
We coupled these results with search data from edshelf. Like Google, searches taking place on edshelf are a good indicator of demand. They represent what you are seeking.
Hopefully this information is useful to aspiring edtech entrepreneurs who want to create something to help educators. Education is a field that deserves attention. It is the foundation of the future. Technology, as a tool, can have a significant impact - as long as it is the right tool that solves a real problem effectively.
Now onto the survey results. Note: respondents were able to make multiple selections, so the percentages do not total to 100%.
These happen to match the most popular subject searches on edshelf fairly well:
We expected math and science to be on top because they are so closely tied to technology. But they make sense. Language skills are critical and technology is a good language learning tool.
We were surprised that word of mouth wasn’t at the top of the list, but it makes sense when you investigate further. Teaching can be a lonely profession and many educators use social media to connect with peers and extend their network. And since social media gives you access to people outside of your existing social circle, the likelihood of discovering new ideas and tools is high.
The top choice here matches the most popular platform searches on edshelf:
Sadly for Google, Android is way down on the list (4% for Android tablets, 3% for Android phones). Will the Android-based Amplify Tablet change that? We’ll see. What we do know is there is a growing demand for tablet and mobile devices in classrooms.
These answers become really interesting when paired with the top categories of tools that educators use, which can act as a proxy for tasks. Note: percentages are of the top 10 categories used.
It makes sense that video content and publishing tools are highly used. You are looking for videos to aid in your instruction, as well as tools to help you create ebooks, digital documents, etc. Study aids can also be used with lesson plans, though searches for lesson plan creators is more frequent than for lesson plans themselves.
What is particularly interesting are the frustrations with “assessing and grading students,” and “assessing and evaluating yourself and/or other educators.” In both cases, tools exist. There are a lot of student assessment and grading tools, as well as teacher evaluation and professional development tools out there. We don’t even see the terms “assess,” “grading,” or “evaluation” appearing in our searches.
Why is that? We have a few conclusions:
For teacher evaluations, the answer seems to be a discovery gap. This is a new category of edtech and there are only a handful of choices out there. For example, if you want to do record yourself on video so colleagues and coaches can give you feedback, you have two options: SmarterCookie and Edthena.
For student assessment and grading, options abound. Some services are new, but most have been around for some time. There are some exciting new categories within student assessments, such as clickers like Socrative, GoSoapBox, and InfuseLearning, but traditional gradebook software has been bundled with large learning management systems. So it’s possible that existing solutions seem good enough.
But are they? Every time we visit a school, we hear complaints about their LMS software. Confusing to use. Can’t do this or that. Slow and breaks down often. Sounds like there’s room here for someone to change all of this. And thankfully, there are. A handful of up-and-coming edtech startups are trying to change this market, though no leaders have emerged yet.
This is an especially interesting question. We didn’t list the last three bullet points in the original survey. The vast majority of you typed in those answers by hand. They must really be frustrating!
We’re happy to say that “too many options; I don’t know what is best” and “tech support and access issues” are two problems edshelf aims to solve. #3 is what we’re doing right now and we are testing solutions for #2 with a handful of pilot schools and members too.
Your top frustration, “they don’t do exactly what I need,” is a loaded answer. It could mean many things:
This answer offers insight to many of the existing searches, such as video content, publishing tools, and study aids. To understand this issue further, let’s pull apart one example, video content. We’ve observed teachers looking for video content to fit their lessons, only to give up and go create their own. If you look at the entire universe of education videos, there are millions, perhaps billions out there. Chances are, the right videos already exist. But who has the time to search through that many?
One conclusion: there needs to be better search and curation for educational content such as this. Fortunately, there are a growing number of solutions, such as instaGrok, Gooru, LearnZillion, Teaching Channel, etc. This is a difficult problem and educators don’t feel that anyone has perfected the solution yet, but we’re hopeful.
Another conclusion: teaching is as much art as it is science. It needs to deal with a wide range of learning styles. Also, every classroom, every educator, every learner is different. For tools to be effective, they must be customizable and adaptable to multiple contexts and situations.
A third conclusion: if existing content is not good enough, then tools to create new content easily will be helpful. The key word here is “easily,” because there are a lot of alternatives. There are all manner of content creation tools, such as Google Docs, Prezi, Educreations, Edcanvas, Common Curriculum, etc.
We hear “they don’t do exactly what I need” echoed in the frustrations of LMS software too, which may have a negative halo effect on student assessment and grading tools. Since educators are frustrated with LMS software, they extend that frustration to all LMS features, such as student assessment and grading.
How about “poor integration with other tools; lack of a single dashboard?” Most LMS packages purport to be a one-stop-shop for educators. They offer a dashboard and many integrate with third-party tools. So why the frustration here? The dominant players, in your words, “suck.” Fortunately, there are a number of edtech startups that aim to replace the incumbents and give you a better experience, such as Schoology, Haiku, Chalkable, etc.
One last conclusion: maybe an LMS isn’t the solution. Maybe it will be an underlying network of interoperable APIs that shares data between disparate services seamlessly. Maybe the dashboard will simply be a view of the data, instead of a portal to all the tools and features you use. The non-profit inBloom seems perfectly poised to enable such a network, though there are concerns over their approach. Startups like LearnSprout and Clever may solve some pieces of this puzzle too.
Edtech in its current incarnation is still relatively young. It is a Wild West. Internet, cloud, and mobile technology is cheap enough now that almost anyone can create a cloud-based product. And many are doing so with similar ideals as edshelf: to make an impact on education.
We’re hopeful that tool creators, at least the ones that plan to stick around and grow, understand these issues and will work with educators and students to address them.
In any young industry, solutions aren’t yet perfect and opportunities abound. We’ve identified some of those gaps here so that aspiring edtech entrepreneurs can take the leap and build something wonderful. Education is the foundation of the future. If you do your homework (no pun intended), understand the needs of educators and learners, and solve real problems effectively, you’ll help us all in guaranteeing a bright future.
Mike Lee, Co-founder of edshelf
