Array of delicious treats to choose from

Photo by Stefano Zocca on Unsplash

Choosing resources is difficult – there is so much available but you can’t have EVERYTHING! As I was researching applications for creating content for our Remote Teaching site, the questions I asked myself were:

    • Do I or people I know use them?
    • Are they free or cheap?
    • Are they intuitive to learn?
    • Are they useful from K-12?
    • How does their privacy policy align with BC’s FIPPA?

Choices

The resources I chose to list in my posts on Content Creation in our Remote Teaching site are mainly tried and true applications that my educator friends have been using. There are many programs out there, but I felt more comfortable recommending ones that I knew about first or second-hand rather than from a blog or magazine article that might be benefitting from advertiser dollars. My goal was also for free applications, programs that have a good price for educational institutions, and programs that link well to Learning Management Systems. I also wanted applications that were easy to learn how to use so they could also then be used by the students and to not overwhelm teachers that are not used to using much tech. Most of the chosen resources are ones I have suggested to less technically savvy teachers and they were able to utilize them fairly easily. Many of the applications are usable to create content by high school teachers and all the way down to teachers of non-readers. There is really no program or online application that provides a learning management system for non-readers well; yet. SeeSaw has some capabilities, but it still needs to be overseen by an adult. I think this is a market that is just waiting to be exploited. There are many games for non-readers, but so far there is no platform that serves them in an audio and picture-based way so that they can just mouse over and click what they need. Unfortunately, that is way beyond my capabilities.

Accessibility

To be honest, I wasn’t thinking much about accessibility of the content creation resources, but more about how they might make content more accessible. If a student has a video, including good images and possibly a whiteboard or pre-prepared presentation, that makes it more accessible. There is hopefully good audio; there is the ability to change the size of the video; there is the opportunity to add closed captions; there is the ability to speed it up and slow it down , particularly if it is uploaded to youtube, or stop and replay. That helps on many levels with accessibility AND with differentiation. I did encourage teachers to keep activities to under 20 minutes. If an educator uses multiple modes of presenting materials (and my posts list a few different ways) and then has additional resources they have curated for their students, this will increase accessibility. One of the things I didn’t like was that each link in my post shows up in a pale blue – not the best colour for those with vision difficulties. I am still not done going over the resources from our workshop with Kim Ashbourne who you might want to  follow on Twitter and visit her blog for more resources, so I expect I have more edits to do before my posts are totally done. (Follow up – Linking options was a huge discussion as requirements are different for different accessibility needs– too bad there is no widget where the reader can choose how they prefer links to open. I also redid all the headers on my posts.)

Outliers

VoiceThread was a bit pricey for my thoughts, but I do have a number of educator friends that really like it and maybe it is a good price when you look at it from an institution price. The same went for Sketchboard, although from my point of view, even the institution price was high. Ryeboard was an application I hadn’t heard about before, but it is so new that it may provide something interesting in the near future therefore I included it. Backchannel Chat looked very interesting though I don’t know anyone that has used it. It would give the availability of multiple small groups chatting behind a group video room that would mimic the classroom environment. I also have not tried Bubble but it looks REALLY interesting and I have some international education friends using it. The Whiteboard apps were difficult to decide what to cut so I cut none of the ones friends say they like. Each is slightly different, so it really depends what you are using them for.

Changed My Mind

Finally, I changed my mind about analyzing the privacy of each of the resources curated. Every teacher/school/division has different levels of what they consider acceptable. Plus, school division plans for certain applications are much more secure than individual plans. I did decide to link the BC FIPPA in each post to encourage teachers to talk with their tech people. There is no use learning an app if you are not allowed to use it!