Starting with tools!!

In this session, our teacher explained us some of the tools we are going to use as we develop the pilot over the next weeks. He presented us four tools he's going to use to assess our work and we will use as tools for collaboration, feedback and inspiration on our mates work as well as for peer to peer assessment. These tools are: TeamUp, SMART Amp, Thinglink and blogs.

TeamUp:

This is a basic iTEC tool, used to create and manage teamwork. As we've written in a previous post, we've used it for building balanced teams taking advantage of mental notes and language assignment features:

We'll use it to monitor the development of our work through the flashes recording feature.

SMART Amp:

The new tool for collaborative work of SMART Technologies is an online tool based on Google Apps for Education. Every student has his/her user and from every kind of internet allowed device access is available everywhere at all time.

Here you can see the teacher's dashboard, where he/she can create classes or invite students; once in a class,

the teacher can manage the students connected and share with them the workspaces (that are the main object of Amp and the basic place for collaboration). Stored and shared via Google Drive, workspaces can be shared within the class or amongst any selected group of students (or even with other teachers in order to develop multidisciplinary tasks or activities).

In this image you can see both the teacher and a student workspaces, one in his/her own drive and the other in his/her shared folder.

Workspaces are canvas where any object can be inserted and modified by any user sharing it, in a collaborative environment where all of them can share their work, inspire others, foster debate, feedback others' work, etc:

Thinglink:

As one of the main objectives of our LS "Virtual Museum" in to use Augmented Reality, our teacher presented us Thinglink, a free and simple tool to add information to an image, enhancing the experience of watching it and providing the vehicle to allow us share content with our learning community. Our teacher showed us some examples of how an image would be after adding information and how to do that:

Here you have the links to the examples provided by our teacher:

example1, example 2, example 3.

Blogs:

As part of the feedback and assessment process while developing our pilot, our teacher asked each team to open a blog about our topic. The idea is to have a way of keeping track of the process complementig the updated information of each session provided by TeamUp recordings. Our teacher asked us to use some free blog platform and he presented us some examples from previous iTEC pilots. Nevertheless, as we use blogs in a daily basis in our school as part of the communication process, this activity will be part of our class rutine, but with the incentive of spreading our contributions in the iTEC platform and in other sites.

In the next post we will share our blogs links in order to make sharing a real part of our work in this iTEC cycle 5 pilot.

Stay tuned!!

SEK-Atlantico 10th grade students, classes A and B.