This is somewhat of a continuation of a previous post: if you haven’t read that yet, you can read it here.
As a seventh-grader, I use a variety of tools at school, and I thought it might be interesting to comment on many of them, both positively and negatively (mostly the latter), and perhaps humorously.
Nearpod. Nearpod is an interactive presentation tool that we often use in class. It displays the teacher’s slideshow onto our computers, so if you don’t have glasses but you need them, maybe it’s easier. It also lets students answer questions and complete a quiz game called “Time to Climb,” in which you need to answer correctly, and fastest. I’m pretty sure that in real life, climbing as fast as possible up a steep mountain with carnival decorations (?) isn’t the best idea. One of my teachers reportedly said at the open house that she is “in love with Nearpod.” Perhaps this is better than being in a relationship with a chatbot, but I’m really not sure.
Toddle. Toddle shows me what assignments I have due and my grades. I think it could show more, but that’s all my school has adopted. They migrated learning management systems to Toddle from Blackbaud last year, and the IT Department thinks it’s the best thing ever. No one else feels so strongly. There are some things I miss from the old program, like being able to add an assignment that isn’t posted by a teacher from within the program (like a to-do list), but overall, it’s fine and mildly infuriating when they do a redesign (every few months, it seems).
Edpuzzle. Edpuzzle, which I touched upon in my previous ed-tech post, allows my teachers to assign my classes videos to watch, and it embeds questions within the videos that we have to answer. For some reason, this year, my school decided to use the embedded version within Toddle, which is annoying. The way Edpuzzle works is it embeds a YouTube video using the youtubeeducation.com domain, which is not blocked, while the main YouTube is blocked by the school’s blocker, Securly. Using our school accounts, embedding a video onto a Google Slide also uses the YouTube Education site, so now everyone just watches videos on Google Slides. Unfortunately, the school can’t do much about that, because then Edpuzzle wouldn’t work, just like the MIT Scratch paradox (if they block Scratch, their programming class won’t be able to use it to make games).
Canva. This one is certainly not just used within my school, and is actually very popular. However, I decided to include it because it’s so strange how my teachers feel about it. Some believe that it is a waste of time, and there are better ways to do projects. But others of my teachers love it, and have us use it for everything, from posters to presentations to documents to videos. I don’t hate it, and I think it gives a lot of creative freedom. However, what I see so many kids doing is just reusing a boring presentation template, but adding images in random places. It always looks almost “too perfect” to me, which is why I never use a template and create my slideshows and videos from scratch. As it works out, educational facilities get free Canva Pro, with which I can do other things.
AI. This one is a bit of the odd one out. As students, we are forbidden from using AI for school-related purposes. However, I see my teachers using it to create assignments, mistake-filled example essays, lesson plans, and class discussion questions. some more than others. It makes me wonder: why am I spending so much time doing this assignment that was obviously created by ChatGPT or Claude (there’s literally a tab with a ChatGPT icon in the teacher’s browser!)? I wouldn’t say that AI is necessarily bad at creating assignments. But there’s sometimes factually incorrect things, or questions that don’t make sense, or analysis that feels far-fetched in a class discussion. If the students can’t use AI, why is there a double standard for the teachers?
SMART Notebook. I don’t get why my teachers love this interactive whiteboard tool so much. They never even put it in presenting mode! It lets them annotate slideshows and PDFs with a pen tool, and that’s all they use it for. It can actually do a lot more cool things, like hooking up to a SMART Document Camera to display on the screen, but of course my teachers only use the strangest features. My school phased out SMART’s projectors a few years back in favor of TVs, but instead of buying SMART’s TV-style boards, they bought Newline TVs, which run a modified version of Android, and connect via HDMI. Since it has four HDMI ports, connecting is very difficult for my teachers, and it couldn’t be that whatever one is hooked up to a computer is highlighted in white, while the others are gray. No way! Sarcasm and interlude aside, SMART Notebook is definitely not always the best tool for the purpose, but it’s whatever my teachers are used to, so we use it. And the other day, we carved our math answers into stone tablets.
So, for all the K-12 Systems Administrators reading this, maybe think twice about the tools you’re paying thousands of dollars a year for. Are they the best options — not even from the students’ perspectives, but from the teachers’ perspectives? What is the value add over Google Slides or another free tool? Do you need to pay for SMART Notebook, or is OpenBoard a better alternative (it is, and it’s free and open-source!)? If my school switched to OpenBoard, they could save about a thousand dollars a year, and while many of my teachers have decades-old libraries of SMART Notebook files on their hard drives, they can be converted to work with OpenBoard, albeit with some buggy elements, and depending on the way it’s done, non-editable components. Or try annotate.net (which my fifth-grade teacher used), which includes compatibility with SMART Notebook, and is web-based.
I don’t know what school was like before all of these tools, but I don’t necessarily feel like any of them really help me learn. As opposed to my classmates, when studying for my math tests, I print out all the SMART Notebook files my teacher shares to go over, and when making creative assignments like posters, I do it by hand instead of turning to Canva. A lot of times, these analog methods are completely ignored in favor of modern, technological approaches. Instead of teachers writing on the whiteboard or chalkboard, they’re sending their presentations to our computers, and we take notes on Google Docs. It almost feels “over-engineered,” like Apple putting the guts of an iPhone into the Studio Display, their 27-inch monitor, to enable advanced camera, audio, and voice assistant features, that aren’t really necessary. So maybe ed-tech isn’t all teachers and admins think it is, and some analog methods are truly the best methods. Plus, chalk is a lot cheaper than dozens of software licenses.