Blog: Evaluation of Software Resources List

Electronic Screen Syndrome - Concerns from an Educational Technologist With each generation, according to a 2017  CBC Marketplace episode, the daily use of mobile devices increases. With Canadian adults ranging from two or three hours a day and rising, their childrens' screen-time is significantly more. When school is in, their use is in the three to four hour range, but when its a day off or a summer break, this number can reach into the double digits. A shocking calculation coming out of this study was that the youngest in the family, who was elementary-school aged, was projected to spend 15 years of his life locked in to his screen, After the numbers hit me, I couldn't help wonder why this was happening, and what the future consequences might look be. As an Education Technologist, the thought of this was worrying to me. Was my push to design, instruct, and manage Ed-tech only adding to this overuse of screens? If screentime is a problem, is the flipped classroom we...

"The Collapse of the Physical World" - Developing a Lexical Resource to Understand Ed Tech  Book Scanner - digitizing the physical world. The collapse of the physical world . When I read this phrase in Boyd's It's Complicated   it struck me. This simple turn of phrase explained so much of what is going on with technology these days. Being an instructor to first year university students and an Educational technologist, it explained so much of what is going on. To give just one example of probably thousands, I'd like to point to the high-speed, page-flipping book scanner. This device literally collapses the physical world. You pop a book in and it flips the pages while scanning them. The scanned file zaps into your memory storage.  Brianstorming more applications of phrase in the world of Education Technology, I can quickly think of quite a few other instances.  "A student's shoulders are hunched over, head hung limp, only the thumb move...

I was just reading Tony Bates' Technology in the Digital Age (2015), one of the seminal coursebooks in the field of Educational Technology. Throughout the book Bates often zooms out and looks at the big picture that technology plays in teaching and learning. One way he does this is to refer to significant moments in Educational Technology throughout history, going so far as to posture Moses' stone tablets as a form of technology.  During his musings on the above, Bates mentions that in 1990, a sea change went into effect with the introduction of a program called Powerpoint. This innovation was replacing the longstanding overhead projector as a fixture in the modern classrooms of the day. I was agape upon the realization that this presentation software was nearing its 30th birthday and wondered just how many major updates and innovations have been implemented into it to make it still hold its position at the top of the list for classroom tools. Indeed, another paralle...

According to Techopedia , a backchannel is  the use of networked computer and instant messaging software in a learning or team-based work environment to provide private or one-to-one communication between the student/listener and the teacher/speaker. The backchannel tool is very useful in my field of work -- teaching English as a second language to international university students in Canada.  The classes I deliver, help plan, and run occasional technology workshops with commonly focus around using technology as a collaborative and communicative tool. At Dalhousie, my current school, as with most university classrooms across Canada, we are equipped with projectors and a desktop in every classroom. Considering the above then, you might see how useful backchannel network can be. Basically, what a good backchannel app can do is provide quick, hassle-free, access for students to post text on a common page. This page is projected on the board in the center of the class...

As an ESL teacher at the post-secondary level, myself and my colleges are constantly looking for ways to increase motivation for students to produce meaningful language. In this day in age, it's also important for us, as teachers, to diversify, digitize, and professionalize our profession. These two thoughts, great classroom tool & how to be sharper professionally, were the two things that came to mind after doing a trial run with the graphic design tool known as Canva. To sum the latter up, I would quote Tony Bates, well-known Educational Technologist, and say that this tool scores very high in the category of 'media richness'. So what is Cava? Canva is a graphic design tool that has the ability to create such things as logos, menus, and weather news infographics. It is very user friendly, offers a top-notch Freemium membership, and produces very attractive, high-quality images. Although there are multitudes of other apps out there that can do such things, Canva...

As a language learning enthusiast and a language teaching academic, I was quite interested in exploring the buzz around the newer language learning software named FluentU. In both Bing and Google searches, it has managed to hold top spots in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and is also something I've seen promoted frequently in such places as language learning conferences and language learning technology publications. So is this the next Pimsleur, a 1980s audio-cassette language program? Or will it rival the still popular Rosetta Stone, which is now categorized in the fast growing "Brain-Training" software market? Will we all be self-taught and fluent in any major world language we set our aims for? Will this be a program which language teachers can exploit and have at their fingertips for any lesson? I've allegorical evidence for this type of program. We often have the best intentions when taking them on. However, within a few weeks, the reality is, most of...

The International English Language Testing System, known commonly as IELTS , is the largest language proficiency exam in the world. The proficiency scores are namely used for three reasons, immigration, academic acceptance, and work-related criteria such a s pay-scale and professional requirements. To give you some more background to the gravity of this test, I'd like to just outline a few big numbers: In 2017, 3 000 000+ tests were delivered in over 140 countries Over 3000 academic institutions worldwide use IELTS There are more than 1200 test centres worldwide Now that you know what IELTS is, I'll tell you what I do. I am an expert and have had multiple roles with the organization. All my positions have to do with the grading and preparation for the exam. With my experience, management offered me a job blogging with IELTS. It turns out that I really like it. And from the feedback MGMT has given me and the rest of the team, it is a very successful part of the websit...