Technology Tools

Tech Tool Evaluation

The point of technology in educational settings is to support teaching and learning goals. Those goals might include forging a strong community, providing opportunities to learn or to demonstrate learning, creating easy ways to carry out teaching functions, and many others.

During CEL480/580, you will have the opportunity to explore a variety of tools that will support your learning goals and will support your online learning environment. You will select a minimum of 4 tools, learn how to use them (we're talking basics level, here... we don't expect you to become experts), and evaluate them for their usefulness in your own course.

Tool Categories and Types

While technology tools could be categorize in a number of ways, we've chosen to categorize them by function. In other words, is their primary function to deliver content, to encourage interaction and collaboration, or to manage the learning environment?

During the course, you will test and evaluate 4 tools types - 1 from the LCMS category, 1 from the Web Conferencing category, 1-2 from the Group Interaction/Collaboration category, and 1-2 from the Content Creation / Delivery category. The last two categories are so large that they've been further broken down into more specialized tool types.

Specific Tools By Type

For your convenience we have listed several specific (and free unless noted otherwise) tools, by type, from each category. If you know of a tool you'd like to try and it's not on the list, please let us know and we'll discuss the possibility of it's use for the assignments in this course. If you are interested in more, go to the bottom of this page for A Bit More Info...

Special note - Google and Zoho both have a suite of Web 2.0 applications that work together seemlessly and provide many exciting collaboration/interaction and content creation opportunities for eLearning. I did not include them on the below list because the list was already long, but they are also options for your testing and evaluation pleasure.

Uber-special note: An *asterisk by a tool signifies that the tool is extremely easy to use. If you select an *tool to test for unit 3 you will have to test two *tools. Same goes for unit 4. In other words two *tools equals one non *tool.

A Bit More Info...

Here's a list of tools you might be interested in compiled by Allison Powell - Web 2.0: Free Online Tools for Your Classroom.

Here's a list of embeddable tools compiled by Holly Rae - Awesome Embeddable Tools.

Another must see list, also compiled by Holly Rae is Important Content Resources You Should Know About.

This is a cool blog - Free Web-based Tools.

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