Apps and Tools for Making thinking visible

Today at the Edtech team summit in Sydney, I went to a workshop presented by Kimberly Hall and Lorinda Ferry. Below are some of the visible thinking tools that we explored.

Answer Garden

This could be a great way to do a collaborative brainstorm at the start of a new topic or before a writing task. We could then discuss the vocabulary that came up the most (bigger words) and extend vocabulary knowledge around these words.

Visible Thinking

Kimberly and Lorinda drew our attention to this site which is full of ideas and suggestions for how learning can be made visible. This will be an interesting site to explore as visible thinking comes into the Manaiakalani Kaupapa.

FlipGrid

This was an interesting app which actually confused me a bit. There seemed to be quite the hype about it however, I felt that through Learn-Create-Share, we are already achieving a lot of what can be achieved on FlipGrid. I would need to explore this a bit more to see if there is any value in it (over and above what our children can already do using their google drives, webcam on their chromebooks and blogs).

Talk&Comment

This was a really good take-away from this session. This chrome extension would allow myself as the teacher as well as other children in the class to leave audio comments on collaborative docs, rather than just written comments. Through the extension you can insert an audio file easily into the comments session on google docs, google slides etc.

Pear Deck

This is another great take-away from this session. It is also a chrome extension for google slides and allows you to create really interactive slides which the children can access. The only problem with this extension would be the inability to rewind in its interactive form. I still need to look into it a bit more to see whether this would be possible or not.

Overall, I got a lot out of this session. I left with some great new ideas to try out in the classroom.