Educational Technology Tools
Educational Technology Tools
Here I have organized some educational technology resources and tools that I use as a learner, educator, and professional. In my role as an IT Systems Engineer, I often help colleagues and students with audio/visual (A/V) projects or events like livestreaming graduation, or setting up a webinar for a presenter we'll have on campus. I have used these tools to either perform these A/V tasks or offered training to folks looking to operate their own presentations and create media for distribution.
This application can house a "library", or single set, of books, and provides templates to create books in a variety of formats.
This application offers templates such as comic books, cook books, fiction, magazine, etc. Multiple people can work on books within the same library at the same time.
There are a lot of options which could be overwhelming for novice users.
This application can be used to make video files, GIFs, and audio files. It also has the ability to video screen capture a computer's desktop screen in-full or in-part.
The interface is intuitive and offers a wide variety of different options for audio effects, visual effects, transitions, annotations and more. It also has the ability to integrate photos, videos, and audio files. Additionally, there is an option for video files with sound to separate the video from the sound to adjust them as you would like.
The application is not free, and it has some complexities that could be confusing for a user who is brand new to video editing, it also is not available on smartphones.
This tool allows users to create posters, infographics, social media posts, newsletters, and more!
This application is free to use, it has an easy-to-use interface, the controls for manipulating the elements in each creation are intuitive and versatile.
There are a wide variety of options and features, it is a little complex and that could be overwhelming for novice users.
This website can help with generating a color scheme for projects, presentations, and graphics.
The interface is simple, you can randomly generate a palette then lock colors you would like to keep and randomly generate again. You can also use their palette visualizer that uses your generated palette across different images and texts. I used this tool to find the color palette for this website.
The editing and visualization features aren't obvious or clearly labeled so new users could very easily overlook the "Visualize colors" button, or not realize that's what the tiny shapes stand for unless they know to hover over those to see the tooltip text. To make use of the more advanced features might take some time to play with the software.
This tool allows users to create rich multimedia like interactive posters, greeting cards, video quizzes and much more.
This application is free to use, it has an easy-to-use interface, the controls for manipulating the elements in each creation are intuitive and versatile.
There are a wide variety of options and features, it is a little complex and that could be overwhelming for novice users.
This application is part of the Google Apps drawer. It works a bit like a white board and slide deck combined, with sticky notes, text and graphic options.
The interface is simple and works a lot like commonly used apps (PowerPoint or Google Slides). It can be used collaboratively by multiple users at the same time.
Certain items, such as the sticky notes, when a new one is created spawn in the exact same spot for all users, so when more than one person creates a sticky note on the same slide at the same time they all show up on top of each other and need to be separated manually. The Jamboard limits each board to no more than 20 slides.
This cloud-based service makes programming mobile apps for Android phones super manageable by using a Graphic User Interface (GUI).
No manual code entry necessary, the GUI interface illustrates object-oriented programming in real time. Once a user is logged in it stores the saved projects to cloud storage it is retrievable anywhere the user can connect to the internet.
The GUI interface is not very accessibility-friendly. Troubleshooting internet connectivity issues will be necessary when transitioning between several different networks while working on projects. If the user's internet connection is poor, progress may be lost and revisions may not be readily available until a stable connection is made. Testing with the companion app requires both devices to be connected to the same network and possibly the precise same Wireless Access Point (WAP).
This website provides writing resources and instructional materials. This includes guidance on: general writing, research and citation, job search writing, and much more.
If you have difficulties remembering how to format a partial date, how to cite 12 authors in-line, or what to do if you can't find a date on an article, this resource can help you figure that out.
This resource is less interactive than others, to make use of it may require some extensive digging and reading depending on the information sought.
This application has quick and easy photo editing features that can be used to create graphics for things like walk throughs.
At the time of writing you can start a free 15-day trial to test it out for yourself, has an intuitive interface.
The application requires a login to use, and the free trial ends after 15-days.
This website allows you to enter a URL, ISBN, DOI, PMID, arXiv ID, or title of a publication and help create citations in many styles; including APA and MLA.
The speed of creating a citation from a URL, or website address, can help immensely with linking to research. Citing your sources can help others who may also be interested in your research, or other authors you cite. It is also handy for formatting citations properly.
The methods this software uses doesn't always get the correct component into the desired field. You can edit citations manually to check and make sure each field is correct but it can be easy to forget this verification step.