Digital Literacy Tutor

Learn about tools that can enhance teaching and learning through the use of technology.

GenAI Tool

U-M GPT

Prompt Input

Role Content
User Act as a digital literacy tutor and draw your inspiration from educational technology experts like Sal Kahn and Monica Burns. I am a university professor who teaches history, and my goal is to learn about tools that can enhance teaching and learning through the use of technology. I teach online and face-to-face so I will need different strategies for those two domains. I’m already comfortable with common tools like Canvas and Zoom. What are some popular and useful tools I can explore to help deliver content and assess my students more creatively?

Example Output

Certainly! As a history professor with a mix of online and face-to-face classes, you'll want to explore a range of tools that can enrich the teaching and learning experience. Drawing inspiration from Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, you should aim for tools that make learning personalized and accessible. And from Monica Burns, an advocate for EdTech, you would focus on tools that can integrate seamlessly into your instruction while offering new opportunities for engagement and assessment.

Content Delivery

1. Video Platforms

  • Edpuzzle: This allows you to make any video your lesson. You can embed questions to check for understanding and track student engagement.
  • Flipgrid: Encourage students to create video responses to prompts you provide, making history come alive through discussion and storytelling.

2. Interactive Presentation

  • Google Slides with Pear Deck or Nearpod: Both integrate with Google Slides and allow you to transform your presentations into interactive experiences, with quizzes, polls, and collaborative boards.
  • Prezi: Offers a dynamic way to present content with a canvas-like approach rather than traditional slides.

3. Storytelling Tools

  • StoryMapJS: Great for creating interactive timelines and maps that can allow students to delve into historical events and narratives spatially and chronologically.
  • Adobe Spark Video: Students can create and share visual stories by combining text, images, and narrations.

Assessment & Engagement

1. Gamification

  • Kahoot!: A game-based learning platform that makes it easy to create, share, and play learning games or trivia quizzes.
  • Quizizz: Similar to Kahoot!, but with a self-paced learning environment that’s great for homework and reviews.

2. Discussion & Collaboration

  • Padlet: An online virtual “bulletin” board, where students and teachers can collaborate, reflect, share links, and pictures in a secure location.
  • Flipgrid: Students can use it to respond to discussions with video and view and reply to their classmates, facilitating a community of practice.

3. Student Response Systems

  • Socrative: Helps you to gauge the class’s understanding through real-time questioning, result aggregation, and visual representations of data.
  • Mentimeter: Interactive presentations with real-time polling, word clouds, quizzes, and Q&A sessions to engage students and collect feedback.

Content Exploration and Curation

1. Open Educational Resources (OER)

  • OER Commons: Provides a platform for searching and accessing a wide range of history resources that can be integrated into your curriculum.
  • Merlot II: An extensive collection of peer-reviewed online learning materials you can integrate into your course.

2. Curation & Organization

  • Wakelet: Use it to curate online material, collaboratively organize resources, and create multimedia collections.
  • Diigo: A tool for saving, annotating, and organizing web resources and articles for class discussions and reference.

For both online and face-to-face classes, it's important to adapt tools to your specific context. For instance, a tool that works well for remote teaching might need to be tweaked for classroom use or vice versa. Always consider factors such as ease of use, accessibility, student privacy, and how a tool will enhance learning objectives.

Lastly, don’t forget the importance of professional development in these tools. Many offer tutorials, webinars, and support communities that can help you gather ideas and troubleshoot issues that may arise. It is beneficial to start with a couple of tools and expand as you become more comfortable with their integration into your curriculum.