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Reflection on This Week's Tools


This week I tried out two writing and publishing tools, one group annotation tool, and one concept mapping tool. Stories for School, Framapad, Hypothesis, and Bubbl.us weren't all that self explanatory when I first joined them, so I had to do some additional research to determine how these tools are used. Here's what I found.

Stories for School

Stories for School allows students to read and write interactive fiction through branching stories or choose your own adventure texts. The app allows teachers to communicate with their students writing throughout the process. Interactive fiction requires writers to think about different scenarios, paths, and links between story chapters. The stories can also be illustrated with different images. I like the idea of this app but didn't really get a good idea of how it worked. The website says students can easily create accounts without email addresses so I think this is a benefit in the classroom. I'd be interested to see this tool in use, especially in a classroom with multiple students.

Framapad

Each pad serves as an online collaborative text editor. I like that contributions of each user is indicated by a different color. Comments appear on screen in real time and are recorded as they're typed. I can see how this would be useful for a team of people to be using at the same time. I tried to do some more research on this app but everything all information and tutorial videos I found were in French so they weren't very helpful.

Hypothesis

I've always written in the margins of my articles or papers while doing research. This type of annotation helps with reading comprehension and developing critical thinking about materials. Hypothesis allows users to continue this annotation with online readings. Users can ask questions and respond to the text. It seems to be a great collaboration tool on understanding and developing ideas about different readings.

Bubbl.us

Organizing your ideas visually in a way that makes sense to you and others is made easy with Bubbl.us. You can take notes, brainstorm new ideas, collaborate, and present more effectively. Mind mapping is a tool for visualizing connections between ideas or pieces of information. Ideas are linked by lines, creating a web of relationships that's easy to understand at a glance and leads to better retention of complex ideas. This is the only tool I was able to find a tutorial video for.


Has anyone used any of these tools? How did you like them?

Comments

  1. JFoxxJune 18, 2020 at 3:11 PM

    Leah, thank you so much for your overview! I haven't looked in to any of the tools yet this week but I was excited about the potential for mind-mapping tools. I have a colleague who teaches senior econ and gov, and she uses mind mapping a lot with them, I would love to be able to recommend one for her if we return to digital instruction next school year! I am disappointed that there weren't more tutorials and help for these tools- that is something I look for- ease of use, or at least ease of learning to use!

    ReplyDelete
  2. DesmondJune 19, 2020 at 10:58 AM

    Those are really great tools. I immediately emailed three of my students about Stories for School. They have already manually done stories like this and I think will have a lot of fun with it.

    ReplyDelete

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