Some Notes on My Exploration of Educational Apps and Tools 

(or Whatever You Want to Call Them)

There's so much out there, it makes my head spin! I poked around and created accounts with the ones that seemed the most useful to both me and students and the ones easiest to learn: Padlet, Feedly and Diigo. Here are my thoughts:

Padlet So simple, so fun and so many possibilities! I didn't do anything fancy with mine other than add a custom wallpaper, but I really like the collaborative aspect.  I talked with a friend who is a middle school social studies teacher about her favorite technology that she uses in the classroom and Padlet was the first one she mentioned.  She showed me a couple of different boards she had students contribute to recently: one was a 45 second advertisement for an everyday object that they had to come up with a unique use for (really funny) and another was a bulletin board where each student had to post a pictures with a description and a link to an article about the Syrian refugee crisis. I love the idea of using it for book trailers and book reviews.  Creative, fun and educational. What's not to love?

Feedly I can be a bit of an information junkie and spend too much surfing various new sites, so the idea of an RSS feeder is appealing to me.  I chose Feedly because it seemed to have good reviews and was very easy to set up. I chose a topics to create folders for (politics and library blogs) and chose websites to add to my feed.  I checked in a while later, and sure enough, there were a bunch of headlines but I can't say I was all that excited. I realized what I really want is a service that will bring attention to things I might otherwise have missed regardless of the source. When I looked up if that was possible, I discovered the keyword filter was the exactly the solution I was looking for.  Unfortunately I need to pay for a premium account to get that service and I'm not willing to do that just yet.

Diigo I took a look at this one because a couple of classmates mentioned on their discussion posts that they liked it. I watch a tutorial and then tried it out myself.  This is one I can actually see using, and I love how simple it is to use with the chrome extension.  I often read things online that I want to save for later or mention to a friend and then can't remember where I read it and I think Diigo is a great bookmarking tool.  I also think it would be very useful for high school students when they are doing research. I also love the fact that they article is archived so that you can retrieve it even if the link becomes broken.