Always looking to make our Thursday nights better, Christopher Nyren of Educelerate (far left in the photo) managed to round up a posse of of Chicago's sharpest shooters in the world of tech-equipped K-12 classrooms. Who knew that Chicago was home to at least three of the world's top mobile K-12 edtech platforms for the iPad? The event was hosted in the snazzy confines of the tech incubator 1871 in the Mechandise Mart (we keep ending up there for some reason...). Repping their wares were: Andrew Rowland, founder of Classkick: "Classkick brings real-time feedback and teacher-made assignments to the iPad." David Vinca, Founder of eSpark Learning: "eSpark enables teachers to bridge the gap between engagement and academics on the iPad. Their platform curates the best iPad educational apps available and personalizes a plan for each learner's unique needs." Christopher Hull, Co-founder of Otus: "an easy-to-use, yet powerful classroom tool that brings the best iPad and Chromebook education features together into one secure environment, and uses a single login." Dealing out the questions and weighing in with wisdom as moderators were K-12 consultants Lucy Gray and Marci Goldberg. In the room were the founders of Edmodo, an older app (from way back in the stone age of 2008), and they offered more wisdom on getting your technology into classrooms, and making it be more useful to students and teachers. And to top it all off, the view was pretty nice, too As I learn the process of Instructional Designers, I've read numerous times about the steps in creating a course or module, but I've learned in execution, that there's a plethora of steps that can be taken to get to the final product, and the final analysis of what your product achieved. Not every project requires all of these steps, and not every designer or consultancy works in this linear progression. As noted on the right, adherents to the Rapid Development model skip steps that are considered redundant or unnecessary.
I plan to show all of these steps in my portfolio of skills, but I have to admit, skipping paperwork, and getting to iterative stages of prototyping looks like a more productive way to keep your client in the loop, get to a workable product, and in the words of IDEO founder David Kelley, “fail often, to succeed sooner”. This nifty little tool lets you take a video from places like Youtube, and turn it into a quizzable lesson!
I need to try this soon!!! Upon going down the rabbithole of similar and related apps, I see that Kahoot takes it further, with audience interaction from tablets and phones, and Educanon is much the same. And, OH MY - Voki makes animated human avatars that talk! Good grief, is this little app fun and funny! I just made an avatar of our President dressed up like a child and blathering silliness. Playtime for now, cool tool for the near future ;)
In my ongoing coursework on training and eLearning Development, I've been finding lots of online courses available to learn from, such as offerings from Coursera, Udemy, and other places.
This is a sample of a Lynda.com course I just completed on Needs Analysis. |
Carl BoydMusings from the world of eLearning Development and Training. Archives
October 2020
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