- Best program for school assignments mac how to#
- Best program for school assignments mac professional#
“If we are talking about acquiring knowledge, Skype is brilliant,” Luhtala said. Skype is a great way to virtually bring experts into the classroom and to help students make real-world connections to what they’re learning. Skype: Educators love simple tools that they can use in multiple ways. High school kids use Google Apps because they can easily collaborate. The emphasis in the higher grades is still on reading and typing - teachers give students fewer opportunities to express their learning in creative ways, so the tools of choice tend to be basic.
They also tend to target younger students - high school students mostly use their phones for personal computing and their laptops for school. The repeat apps that have made it to this favorite list added functionality without doing so too quickly. Luhtala explained it’s a delicate balance: “If it doesn’t feel different than it did a year ago, that’s alarming.
Best program for school assignments mac how to#
Teachers tend to drop apps if they become too expensive or sometimes if the updates are so overwhelming that they no longer know how to use the product. The list of apps that educators favor this year shares some commonalities with last year’s favorites. “It’s hard to get the teachers on board with this at all, so to say we’re going to do it differently next year is a tough sell,” Luhtala said. Learning is hard and change is even harder, so once teachers have found a tool that meets their learning goals, they are unlikely to shift without a good reason. If they are using something that works well, they’ll probably stick with it, even if another slightly better product comes along. Luhtala has also noticed some app fatigue among her colleagues. “They’re talking about what kids are doing in the classroom far more than they are about the devices and the apps,” Luhtala said. Rather than picking an app and trying to find a place for it in the classroom, Luhtala is hearing educators and their students describe what they want to do and then how they chose a tech tool to make that happen. "They are thinking about how to best integrate the innovation with content." “You are giving them an opportunity to improve their own expectations because they aren’t just dealing with the technology," Luhtala said. “A year ago people felt like it was this new thing that was so overwhelming,” Luhtala said, “and now it really seems much more comfortable.”Įducators have become proficient with their favorite classroom apps and are getting more creative with using them to achieve teaching goals. 'If it doesn’t feel different than it did a year ago, that's alarming.
Best program for school assignments mac professional#
She tapped her professional learning network of educators, teaching all grades and located all over the country, to share their favorite tech tools.
“The conversations I had were radically different than they were a year ago,” said Michelle Luhtala, the librarian for New Canaan High School and host of an Emerging Tech webinar on edWeb. While the sheer number of education apps is still overwhelming, increasingly teachers have found what works for them and are sticking to them. Educators and students are quickly becoming more comfortable with classroom technology, allowing them to shift from thinking about the technical side of integrating a new tool to focusing on how it improves learning.
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