By Marwa Kotb.
Two weeks ago, I mailed my learning colleague Tom Pennels to work on our assignment trends and roles, few days after we had our first Skype call and agreed to work on topic educational technology, last Tuesday we had another call to discuss articles we found related to educational technology, Tom referred me to two interesting articles and briefly explained them to me .
The first article by Smith, (September, 2015), “How PowerPoint is killing critical thought ”, the article is about using powerpoint as a mean to deliver lectures, lots of arguments some sees powerpoint make audience feel sleepy and bored, others find it a good tool to present information in an organized way, the article had one impressive point that not all topics can be bulleted and we can’t blame powerpoint for failure of delivering a course content, I personally use PowerPoint within my classes and I find it effective to present many theoretical concepts.
The Second article, by Matheson, (December ,2014), “Tracking what students grasp: Socrative mobile quiz app saves teachers time and offers real-time data on student comprehension of material”, the article is about Socrative app that lets teachers design or select premade quizzes for students to answer on their personal mobile devices during lectures. The app is now being used by about 1.1 million teachers and millions of students across the globe.
One important issue I learned from this web conference experience is educational technology tools success and failure to achieve learning goals relies on educators’ right selection of the tool and how effective and relative this tool to the topics they are teaching.
References:
Matheson R. (2014, December 11). Tracking what students grasp. MIT. Retrieved from http://news.mit.edu/2014/socrative-app-real-time-data-student-comprehension-1211.
Smith A. (2015, September 23).The Guardian. How PowerPoint is killing critical thought. Retrieved from
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