Last year Carroll Community School District entered into an agreement with Kuglin Consulting to provide ten days of technology training in five two-day training sessions. In order to build capacity throughout the district a leadership team was formed consisting of teachers and principals from each building, and me, the district superintendent. This past week the team finished days seven and eight. If you are the adventurous type and like to learn or experiment with instructional technology I encourage you to try some of the tools I discuss in this blog post.
During sessions seven and eight the team learned several new tools to add to the instructional toolbox. The first tool I want to share with you is SymbalooEDU. Symabloo is a visual bookmark organizer that allows internet users to have their favorite websites at their fingertips. Symbaloo gives the appearance that the websites are apps on your computer screen. This application prevents a person from having to type a long url into the web browser or making a mistake while typing. Setting up a Symbaloo account is free and quite easy. Click on this link to view a short You Tube video on getting started using Symbaloo.
The second tool I would like to introduce is called Mozilla Popcorn Maker. Popcorn Maker allows the user to insert text, pop-ups, tweets, interactive maps, etc. into either You Tube videos or self made videos. Here is an example of a video from Popcorn Maker's website. This video is my first trial with using Popcorn Maker. This technology can make videos used in the classroom much more interactive and engaging. Popcorn Maker is relatively new technology.
While anti-technology individuals may view these tools as educational toys, I would argue the tools can assist educators in enhancing their lessons to engage the learners in their classrooms. I strongly encourage tech savey educators to experiment or as I like to say "play" with these new 21st century tools to improve student performance.
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