Week 6 Tool Review

This week the tools focused on writing/publishing, annotating, and mind-mapping or concept mapping. These are all types of tools that I would love to incorporate in my classroom and share with colleagues. There is such a need to help students improve their critical thinking, writing skills, planning out their writing, thoughts, or arguments, and these tools may be tools that can aid in teaching those skills. I tried out several of the tools that were recommended and then explored one of my own as well. Here are my thoughts for each tool. 

Framapad is a collaborative text editor for writing/publishing. At first glance, this tool feels very similar to Google Docs allowing multiple users to collaborate on writing and editing a document. Each user is assigned a specific color, which is nice, it makes is very clear who has added what content- easy for users to edit and easy for teachers to grade. There seems to be a lot of different ways users can collaborate as well, mind maps, graphs, etc. but there are no clear tutorials and some of the descriptions are in French (at least I think it is French). Overall, I think I will still with Google because I am more familiar and feel as though there is better support if I encounter any problems. 

Hypothesis is another annotation tool that we explored this week and once again I am not a fan. I must not like annotating very much, because just like Diigo, I look at this tool and think, boring! Not every website and tool has to be flashy and pretty, but I have to want to explore and use it- these annotation tools just do not give me the desire to use them. 

The following are all tools that are more visual in nature- mind-mapping or concept mapping tools, and a tool that can be used for debates, or planning an argument or outline for writing. 

Bubbl.us and Mindmeister were the two concept mapping tools recommended this week and they are pretty similar to one another. They both allow for sharing and collaboration, but out of the two MindMeister seems to be slightly better. It is more user friendly, I like the interface better, and it started with a tutorial right away. Bubbl was a little bit harder to navigate and there was no immediate introduction or tutorial. 

The tool that I added is one that kept popping up on my Twitter as an advertisement. It is called Kialo and there are two different versions- Kialo for the public and Kialo for education. I spent time exploring both this week. There are great debates that you can search through and participate in on the public version and the education version allows teachers to create a topic for discussion and students add their pros and cons, users can vote based on the strength of the argument. There are sample assignments for classroom debates, essay writing, and even a knowledge-sharing activity. I absolutely love the ease of use and the great visual aspects of this website, it was also easy to sign up and there are a lot of great resources like the sample lesson plans and tutorials to use. I am very excited that the Twitter algorithm decided to show me this ad because I do plan on using Kialo in my classroom next year. Check it out and let me know what you think in the comments!