Digital Tools for Engagement

Blogging is a great tool for engagement for a variety of reasons. It's a writing form that can enable students to reflect on what they already know about a topic in a way that is more visual, as they can incorporate images, videos, and sound to support their ideas. With many platforms available like edublogs, kidblog, and weebly, students can access blogging with ease.

Virtual Walls are online interactive spaces where teachers and students can post sticky notes in a number of ways. These notes can include text, files, images, and video and these walls can be co-created as multiple users are able to interact with it in real time. Padlet and Linoit are two great examples of Virtual Walls and are useful tools for idea generation, providing feedback, and collaborative writing projects. The ability to integrate multimedia allows students a higher quality of choice in how they engage with their ideas and new concepts.

Online Calendars provide valuable tools for setting, monitoring, and maintaining goals. Google Calendar is one such example that has built-in goal setting features. Once a goal is set, it schedules it into open slots in your calendar, and then sets reminders for you to persist with your goals. Erik Devaney of HubSpot wrote a detailed description of how to make use of these features here. There are also many habit shifting apps that can assist in sustaining effort towards achieving a goal. For example, Habit List is an app that tracks goals, provides feedback, and monitors trends using data. Allowing students to explore the features in these types of apps allows them to choose the goal-setting strategies that work best for them.

Learning Management Systems (LMS) are software applications that are used for the facilitation, tracking, and reporting of educational courses. This kind of software allows for online spaces that foster collaboration and community through the use of synchronous and asynchronous chat features (e.g., live chats, forums, video messaging). They also integrate multimedia to provide discussion formats that can be more visually engaging (e.g., linking short video clips, diagrams, infographics). There are many LMS available, each with their own features for fostering collaboration and community. Google Classroom, Edmodo, and Brightspace are examples of LMS and are flexibile systems that allow learners to engage with their peers in a variety of ways.

Micro-Blogging is a concept similar to blogging, except on a much smaller scale. Micro-blogs (sometimes called microposts) allow users to share small content like short sentences, an image, a short audio file on a range of topics. This concept can be applied for reflection (micro-reflections) throughout a learning process to create a timeline of thoughts represented by text, image, and audio. Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are great tools for this reflective documentation process. By posting small updates and thoughts when working on a project or a task, users can revisit their ideas upon completion to then reflect more deeply using a traditional method (e.g., blogging). The added benefit in using these social media platforms for micro-reflecting is that others can be invited into the process by viewing your posts and providing additional feedback to consider. For more information, Daniel Nations of Livewire wrote this helpful review of micro-blogging and its uses.