School of Education faculty host Tech and Talk session

Allison Bryan, director of the Curriculum Resources Center and Erin Hone, lecturer in education, facilitated an informative and engaging Tech and Talk session for faculty in the School of Education through WebEx on Tuesday, July 28.

During the virtual session, six faculty demonstrated excellent tools to help engage students and enhance teaching in the fall.

Scott Morrison, associate professor of education, presented about Loom, a video recording tool that helps you get your message across through instantly shareable videos. With Loom, you can record your camera, microphone, and desktop simultaneously, and your video is instantly available to share. As of March 12, Loom Pro is free to all verified teachers and students at K-12 schools, universities or educational institutions who are using Loom for classroom work. A similar tool is Screen-O-Matic which has a free option and a Deluxe option for $1.65 per month.

Erin Hone, lecturer in education, presented about student engagement platform Seesaw, which helps teachers empower students to create, reflect, share and collaborate. Formative assignments can be set to a specified medium or students can choose to “show what they know” using photos, videos, drawings, text, PDFs and links. Faculty can give feedback to students in similar ways and it is easily compatible with Moodle and Google Classrooms.

Katie Baker, assistant professor of education, presented about Zoom. Elon is now Zoom official. Zoom is a video and audio meeting platform that allows for whole group rooms and breakout rooms. Meetings can be recorded and stored on your device or in the cloud. Security features like the participant waiting room and password protection help to make sure your meeting doesn’t get unintended visitors. Instructional features like the integrated whiteboard, chatbox, and polling can be used to create student-centered learning experiences.

Allison Bryan, director of the Curriculum Resources Center, presented about Zoom integration. Swivl now integrates with Zoom. This allows another option for live streaming in the fall with a little more flexibility than the technology in the classrooms. This tech tool is great for building community, having small group conversations and creating course content.

Jeff Carpenter, associate professor of education and director of Teaching Fellows Program, presented about edPuzzle, a simple video-editing platform that allows you to work with existing video content (e.g. YouTube content, your screencasts) to tailor it for your teaching. With edPuzzle you can: cut videos to the length you want, add voice-over to existing videos, and add multiple-choice and open-ended questions, as well as brief notes to existing videos.

Heidi Hollingsworth, associate professor of education, presented about Flipgrid a web app that allows students to record videos of up to 10 minutes in length in response to a specific question, reading, experience, etc., or to share a greeting or talk through an idea. It allows the teacher to hear every voice instead of just those who participate frequently. Teachers can change settings to hide/show videos, enable student-to-students replies, and more. If enabled, students can then respond to each other’s videos. Hollingsworth noted that it a nice change from written activities and is more social.