Free Technology for Schools

I was very excited to road test a new tool today live in my lesson using a combination of paid and free technology. My school uses the Frog VLE which although a little bit glitchy, is good enough for me to plan all my lessons through and share resources with my students. I still find however that I get to do more creative things with free technologies and as long as the fact we paid for a VLE isn't a barrier to using other useful technologies (which it often is in other schools!), I am happy.

Although I am a Physics teacher by trade, I currently teach IB Environmental Systems and Societies. Today my students were looking at case studies of extinct and endangered animals and I wanted them to present it in a creative way. Lately I have been hugely impressed with sites like Padlet and Tackk that let you create high quality content without even logging in, with a simple link to share. Today I used Smore. It is similar to Padlet but focuses on creating fliers or posters rather than 'web sites'.

The impressive thing with this tool was how quickly they were able to produce high quality content which they then presented to the rest of the class. Once they completed it, they then shared the link to their poster as a comment on the class blog meaning I was able to access them quickly and they could present their work before the end of the lesson.

To give an idea of how easy it is to use I am going to create a flier ( advertising guest posting on Free Tech for Schools hint hint) and embed it here. at the bottom, I will write how long it took.
 

Total time, including writing and uploading photo: 4 minutes and 6 seconds