Melinda Holt: And I'm going to hand it off to Jeff Goumas. I'm going to try again.

Jeff Goumas: Close enough. This is going to be a pretty participatory webinar. Mostly because I want us to sort of all be in the moment and experiencing using different technologies as a way of modeling the type of thinking that I hope we all leave with. And that is regarding thinking about how different technologies are being used. Why they are being used, what we're trying to accomplish with those different technologies, and making considerations for how we might use these both now and in the future, which is the title of today's webinar. On that link to open up the Wakelet. And I will show you that in a second again, but that Wakelet contains these slides. It also contains all of the links for every single activity I'm hoping as many of you as possible will participate in with us today.

So today's session is called Building Online Strategies for Today and Tomorrow. And as Melinda said, my name is Jeff Goumas from CrowdED Learning. We are a non-profit organization based in Chicago. And our entire focus is on free and open education resources and helping make these more useable to adult Ed instructors and students. So that there's just a wider variety of options for learning and for instruction within the field.

And the reason that we decided to do this webinar is for the past three months I think this probably could characterize for many of you, your experience, right. Mid-march is probably, that's when it happened in Chicago and in Illinois and I'm assuming the same in California, where suddenly we had all of these school closures. Where suddenly you were being asked to continue learning with your students regardless of whether or not you had in the past been actively using technology with those students. Suddenly the only way that you were going to be afforded the ability to continue learning was by way of learning how to new use-- to use new tools, excuse me, helping your learners learn how to use these new tools, albeit not when you're together with them which we all know is a challenge in terms of helping someone learn how to use new technology remotely. And then to start sort of getting back to some semblance of normal, whatever that looked like for you from a distance.

And so that really happened in a very, very short period of time. We were all asked to make very fast decisions in terms of things that we wanted to use. And for many of you were using some technology before that process might have been a little bit more seamless. For others it might have been a bit more challenging. But at this point the hope is that you are in some level of sort of normalcy in terms of what you're doing and how you're doing it. And you've sort of narrowed down and settled into a few technologies that you're using pretty regularly. And that's awesome.

The goal of today is for us to sit and reflect a little bit in terms of what are those tools that you are currently using and have tried using? What have been the challenges? Why have you selected those tools? Most importantly though, thinking about, OK, if this is something I'm using now because I have to, because we are separated, is it something that I will continue to use when we get back to normal?

And I think another thing that kind of happened when we all jumped into having to teach from a distance was that this is something that is going to be temporary. And it's obviously probably lasted longer than many of us have thought. And with the sense that we're already in June, July, August depending on whether or not you work on a sort of September to June schedule, we have no idea what things are going to be looking like in September. And so we really have to start thinking about, OK, what are we using now and how can we be more strategic in how we are using those?

And I would argue that a lot of the tools that you're probably using, it does not matter if you're back face to face in person or were entirely at a distance or there's some semblance of both. A majority of those tools probably have affordances that can enhance what you are doing instructionally regardless of the settings. And so we're going to talk through that today.

So the outline for our session today is really a lot of reflection and I am going to be, as I said, active engaging you during this webinar to both share through the chat as well as through some tech tools that we're going to use and reflect upon their use. So that we're sort of modeling that thinking about how can I use this in the future.

Then we're going to look at characterizing tech tools. And what I mean by that is you've been using various tools for different things. So just trying to bucket these different tools in terms of these are communication tools or these are instructional or content tools or instructional delivery tools. To help sort of think about what are the different technologies that I use for each of the things that I need to be doing instructionally and what are the benefits that each of these tools bring to each of those things.

Then we're going to look at strategies for integrating technology. And it's not just going to be from the standpoint of what we're doing right now because we have to but also thinking through, again, what September or whatever the data is for the return to normal looks like. Whether that is fully out of distance, whether it is partially at a distance, whether it's entirely face to face. You have new tools in your toolbox. So what are some strategies that we can think through in terms of how to use those regardless, again, of the context in the setting. And then some planning for the new environment within that.

So since you are all strangers, I think one of the things that you've probably realized is when selecting tools that you're going to use with your students, you need to spend a significant amount of time onboarding your learners with that new technology. And the idea, hopefully, has been to settle into a few specific tools that you're going to be using regularly. That since you have your students, you've hopefully established some sort of normalcy in terms of this is the tool that we're going to use for x, y or z.

You are not my students, you are just my students for a day. So I want to sort of introduce the technologies that I'm going to be using as part of this webinar and how I'm intending to use them with you. So obviously, we are in Zoom right now. Zoom is a tool for video conferencing and it might be the driver for a lot of you in terms of your face to face or your real time instruction at the moment. So that is a tool for communication and for real time communication.

The tool that I pointed you to in the chat, which is Wakelet, and I'm just going to hop in the chat because I don't know if I'm going to add the link again into the chat. That is a Wakelet and we're going to look at it in a second. And a Wakelet is basically a tool that allows you to create collections of resources. They can be websites, they can be images, they can be videos, they can be docs that you have and then pulling them together in one place so that a student, or in this case you, my participants of this webinar have access to all of the resources that we're going to be using today in this single Wakelet.

And so it's a very flexible tool that can be used in a lot of different ways. But that is my tool that I'm going to be using to organize the tools that we're going to be using as part of the participation in today's webinar. So I'm going to be using a polling software called Mentimeter. Now Zoom actually has polling within it. So if you've used Zoom in the past, you may have used the poll feature. I do tend to use polls in Zoom when I'm in charge but since OTAN, it's OTAN software, I didn't have the ability to get in there ahead of time so I chose to use Mentimeter.

Now using Zoom polling is great if you're doing it sort of for a one time lesson. But say you have a lesson that you're going to do four times or you're going to do again the next quarter, semester, or a year. You might want to use a polling software because then if you have an account, that poll is safe. And it saves so that you can reuse it the next time you teach that lesson or concept.

And for example, if I do this webinar again, which I really was excited to pull it together so I most definitely am going to redo it. I have my poll already created, I have my Wakelet already created that's organizing all of these things. I have this Google Sheet that we're going to use as part of collecting your ideas. And then I have a Padlet already created. So all of these things are already created for this webinar that I'm giving. And so I can give it many times over because I've used these different tools and I've organized them into one Wakelet.

So that's sort of one of the considerations you want to make. But the tools we're going to use, I'm going to poll you on sort of what your experience has been up to this point. We're going to collect some information in terms of characterizing the tools that you've been using in a shared Google Sheet. And we'll talk about why that's a good tool to use for different types of tasks. And then I'm going to ask you to collaborate a little on a Padlet. And many of you may be familiar with Padlets. So these are the tools that we're going to be using today.

If you really don't want to be hopping around and you just want to be a passive observer and to see and participate just in the chat, that's perfectly fine. But hopefully some of you are actively engaging in each of these things. The poll in particular, I hope everyone can participate in. But I do need to have people participating so we can just see how these tools work in an environment where everyone's contributing and then discuss how that might work with your students.

So the first tool that we're going to look at is Wakelet. And Wakelet, as I said, is a content curation tool that allows you to pull things together. An interesting thing about Wakelet, it was not developed for education at all. I have a Wakelet account, I have a Wakelet collection of winter recipes and that's kind of the nature of what it was intended to be first. Sort of like a Pinterest of sorts but sort of with more ability to organize different types of resources in different ways. And then educators started using it and realizing, hey, this has a lot of benefits for education.

So if you have not, that link, the very last thing in the chat, is the link to the Wakelet for this session. So hopefully you can go ahead and click on it. Now I'm in Google Slides right now which I guess I should have also mentioned. Google Slides is a teaching tool, right. This is a tool that allows me to organize my instruction and deliver it. And again, if you've been designing lessons and doing them with students online, if you create Google Slides for those lessons that creates a nice sort of frame for you to, again, reuse the next time you want to teach a particular lesson. So just consider that.

So Wakelet is a tool that I'm going to open up here. And hopefully if you guys are in the slides then you're already in the Wakelet. But what you're going to see is I've created the slide deck and I've linked it in here. I've added these resources, these teacher tools which we're going to look at. And then the three activities that we're going to do. If you remember I showed that all the tools that we're going to be using, activity one is going to be a Mentimeter poll. All you're going to have to do is click on this to launch that poll.

The second activity is going to be a Google Sheet that is shared. And you can open these all up right now and then just once we're ready to hop into them they'll go for it. But activity two is going to be this Google Sheet and then activity three is going to be this Padlet.

And again, I'm using a bunch of different resources with you because I'm trying to model some of the things that we can be thinking about as we reflect. Again, you might be using just one or two resources that you've really gotten your students familiar with. I wouldn't recommend just one day saying, we're going to use five new resources today together.

But the way Wakelet works is in this case, I've created just this sort of resource, this bucket of resources for you. I could also use Wakelet to create lessons, right. So here is a one that I created as part of the webinar that I did on a tool called Skill Blocks which allows you to find free and open education resources. And what this allowed me to do was I can pull in an interactive activity on fraction equality. I can pull in another one using your fraction number line. I can pull in lessons from Math is Fun or from Khan Academy. I can pull in games that deal with equivalent fractions. And I can pull in practice from Khan Academy. And I can pull all of those things together in one Wakelet.

And then the way that I share that with students is I just click on Share and you'll see it's easy to integrate with Google Classroom. Or I can share the link as I did with you. I can send it through Remind. I could send it through Facebook. I could tweet it if I wanted to. There's a bunch of-- I can even PDF it so that this is the hard copy PDF file that I'm sharing with students. So it's a very flexible tool.

But I'm using it in this case to provide you with all of the resources that are needed for today. So that as opposed to when we get to activity one, I have to share a new link with you and then we get some activity two I need to share with you. If I get you all into this Wakelet up front then when I say, let's go to activity one, it's already in the Wakelet. And so that's why we're using this as the tool.

So with that, I am going to start with our first activity. And so if you are not in the Wakelet, please do so. That's the link that's there. If you have decided that you just aren't planning on opening the Wakelet, this is a poll that we're going to do using a Mentimeter. And there's three questions. I will launch into it in a moment. But if you have a phone and you want to take the poll on your phone, maybe you just want to see what that works looks like, go ahead and use your QR code reader right now to scan this. Or in the Wakelet you can click on the link for the poll which is activity one. Or if you're not in the Wakelet, you just want to open another browser tab, you can go to menti.com and you can enter the code 17 17 21.

So I'm going to escape out of here in a second. Again, if you want to scan this go ahead and I'm going to hop into Mentimeter. And there's three questions. Awesome I, see lots of people responding already. The three questions and the first one you can answer as many times as you want. What are the primary ed tech tools that you've been using? The next question relates to whether or not you would use these tools previously. And the final question is whether or not you intend to continue using these tools moving forward.

But I love looking at the word-- the word cloud that sort of starts forming as people are sharing the differential. So not surprising, Zoom and Google Classroom and Google Docs are the big ones. You see Padlet, you see Remind. 48 have responded. So that's kind of a nice feature here that I can see how many people on here have responded. So Zoom seems to be the big winner. If you're familiar with word clouds, the larger the word, the more-- the more people entered that as their response.

So the ones that are the biggest, there's not a lot of surprises in here, Google Docs, Google Forms, Google Meet, Google Classroom, lots of Google. Zoom and Padlet, Quizlet, and see Flipgrid and Screencastify. So YouTube is also in there, which is probably more widely used than maybe you didn't even think to add that. But that obviously is a tech tool. So we're seeing the clear winners. And there's again, not a lot of surprises there.

When we go to the next slide and statement of where the tools you mentioned, which statement best fits your usage pre-COVID. So 9 of the 26 that have responded to this said I had used all of these tools beforehand. The largest number is I had used some of these tools but some were new. And these are going to sort of tweak a little bit as folks are responding. And five of you have said that I had used none of those tools. And hats off to you because I think this has been a really challenging time for folks who are not used to using technology and it has really forced a lot of people out of their comfort zone.

So great. So it looks like there's a good mix. And again, I would assume that some of these tools you probably use. Some of these tools you haven't for many of you. Let's go to the next one. Good answer. There's no right or wrong, you're not going to get judged if you answer the last one, but which statement best fits your planned use of these tools when we quote unquote return to normal.

And again, I think for a lot of us we probably anticipated this might be a two or three month thing. Might not have necessarily thought that it was going to go through the summer. And when we think about the new normal, even if you have face to face classes schedule then you think that you'll be able to do that. When we think about the fact that one, we might have students that aren't comfortable going back to class. So how are you going to accommodate the students that want to access these services but they're not comfortable going into a classroom setting just yet?

The other added layer that I feel is going to be a challenge for us is we're going to have increased demand for adult education. I know there is the jobs report from the Bureau of Labor statistics that came out and unemployment might be creeping down a bit but we know there is a massive amount of unemployment right now. And as we know the story goes with adult education, when unemployment is low adult education enrollment is low because people are working. And then the flip side happens that when unemployment is high people seek out education because they feel about other opportunities.

And this again is a tool called Mentimeter. So in reflecting what we just did, so what was the task that I was trying to accomplish with the poll? So I see people are answering my last question but so my next question is, what was the task that I was hoping to accomplish by using Mentimeter?

But polling software, yeah, it does give me the opportunity to get sort of controlled information from you if I can sort of organize that in a way that you all have the ability to respond, right. Right now you're all adding into the chat and there's a flurry of activity and that's great, that's participatory. But if I know there's a certain number of things and information that I'm trying to get at, a polling software works great.

So in what ways was this an effective tool for doing that? Obviously, again, if I want to do polling I'm going to figure out what tool I want to use. I'm going to make sure that I work with my students to understand how to use it. And then I will consistently use that tool so that there's not the sort of learning curve that has to happen every time I'm using it.

But you can use this upfront as a tool for just getting a sense of where your learners are. You can use it mid lesson as a tool to see if learners have understood what it is that you're teaching. You could be using sort of real time formative assessments to ask questions. And if everyone's answering correctly, then you can move on. If everyone's not answering correctly then you probably need to stop.

You could do it, I mean, you could use it as an empathy check. One of the sessions that I've been to in the past three months, someone was using Google Forms as a tool for getting empathy. The question is Mentimeter, is it a free tool? It is a free tool. You only have, you have limitations in terms of how many live polls that you can have active. But you can, I think right now actually, I think with a lot of tools they're all free for everybody. I think with Mentimeter you have the ability to have three free tools.

There's other tools like Coocoo that allow you to poll students as well. Quizizz is another tool that allows you to poll students. And again, it gives you this opportunity to get answers from your students in an anonymous way but also to graphically look at it and talk about responses.

What factors would you need to consider if you were to use this with learners? You'd need to consider do they have access to the technology that is needed? Now if you notice at the front end, I gave you three different options for accessing it, right. So if you were in the Wakelet you could just click on it and launch it through the Wakelet. If you wanted to stay in this presentation and Zoom but you wanted to access it from your mobile phone, you could use your QR code reader. And if you were using this in class and you have a projector, you can zoom in to that QR code-- QR code, excuse me, so students can scan it with their phone.

So there's all sorts of parameters in terms of how you might want to use it or you can enter it using menti.com and the code. So there's different ways and you want to work with your students to understand how they're going to be accessing it. And then finally my last question is, how might you use this tool for similar tasks? Are there alternative tools to Mentimeter? And I think we've kind of walked through some of those. I guess I spoil that by talking ahead of the question that I had. But yes, you could use this for a formative assessment, you can use it for teacher meetings.

One of the things about Mentimeter is you can actually create presentations in Mentimeter. So you can just have slides that you're creating that don't have polls and then add slides that are solely poll slide. Google Slides, if you're using Google Slides, has integration with a tool called Poll Everywhere. Which is another tool, it does cost money, but you can seamlessly embed your polls into Google Slides so that you as the presenter don't have to hop back and forth.

But these are some of the things that I need to think about in choosing dates for meetings. That's a great idea so giving options for people to select in real time and then using that data to make a decision in real time. As opposed to the endless emails that we tend to use when we're trying to set dates for meetings.

So when we're thinking about these tools we need to think about what's the reality in terms of how we'd use this with learners. It has a specific purpose but what are the other sort of things that I could use it for? Remember the example I gave with Wakelet. It was not intended to be an education tool. Now that's their primary area of business with Wakelet, which is also a free tool. And so thinking about what are the affordances this technology offers me and how could I use it for some of the different tasks that I want to be doing?

So I'm going to walk through two examples of scenarios in which technology has been used to solve a problem that was presented to teachers, these are real scenarios, in adult education. So I want you to sort of think about what's going on in this situation and what is the problem being solved.

So the first scenario that I'm going to bring up is providing open access live classes. So in response to school closures, a school in Texas set up a schedule on a Google site where learners can see what classes are available and they can join via Zoom. So in this case because they can't meet face to face this school set up a Google site and they set up their schedule. They actually at the time had two months worth of Zoom meetings. So where it was the times that the session would be offered, who the instructor was, now I've blurred those out just for anonymity purposes, the content and the level for the class, and then the ability for anyone to join the Zoom meeting.

You didn't need to be enrolled in the class, it was sort of a recognition of the fact that you may or may not be able to come to class right now. So they decided we're not going to stick with sort of the regular schedule because we know everyone's been so disrupted. But what we're going to do is provide all of these classes, make them available to anybody who wants to join if you can. Here are the links, there already there. You have one website that you go to be able to join these classes and we're going to provide the recordings of each of these afterwards.

Here's COVID scenario number two. So and this is the teacher that I actually work with here in Illinois. So at a community college here in Illinois, an adult ESL teacher began open office hours using Zoom. And students sign up for those Zoom office hours via a schedule that she has shared with her learners on a shared Google Sheet. So she's created a Google Sheet and it has the times that are available. And students can go and access that Google Sheet and if there's a time slot available they can enter their name and they've then reserve that spot and she uses a Zoom room for students to be able to participate or to join those office hours.

This teacher, and this is the part that I find very interesting, this teacher had always had open office hours in person. So when we were in class and working in person, she is not a distance learning educator. Her classes were in-person. She had open office hours. She reports at the time she said students rarely took advantage of those office hours and she reports now that more students take advantage of office hours now offered virtually than they ever had when they were offered in person.

So thinking of these two scenarios, and these two obstacles that both of these scenarios the schools or the teacher had to overcome. I want you to use the chat again to respond to what problems were these teachers attempting to solve by using the tools that they selected.

Continued communication, connection, attendance, digital divide, giving some students privacy around their problems. That's great with the open officers choice. Student motivation, access to class, and very organized meetings for the classes. There was a lack of face to face options so they had to overcome that. Scheduling challenges, so they just created students with flexibility. If you can join, you can join. If you can't, you can't. But we'll have the recording available. And accessibility, awesome.

What existing obstacles or barriers before COVID, so what are some barriers that you probably experienced in your situation. So pre-COVID, think of some of the barriers of learners engaging with adult education. What barriers might continued use of these tools help learners overcome in the future? So even when we get back to class, think pre-COVID, what are those barriers that we know often exist for students that using the tools that were used for this current situation might actually help students overcome?

So class schedule not working for all students, student comfort levels, scheduling and kid problems, the teacher with open office hours shows that student precipitation is higher virtually. Students who weren't engaged before might be able to. Choosing between work and school. So shy to participate in person. So these are all great things.

When we think about some of the barriers to accessing education right now that we know have always existed. Transportation, child care, you think about that teacher at the community college what student, adult ed student, has time to kick around after the class time that they've sort of worked out to be able to attend to then add on additional hours that they are intending to their familial responsibilities or their work responsibilities or other responsibilities to be able to fit that teacher's schedule and be on campus. Whereas with their home and they have the availability to access open office hours virtually, they are more likely to attend.

Now also there's probably additional supports that a lot of people were seeking out during this time. But when we think about what these technologies offer it allows us to scale some of the things that we're limited in our ability to do and were before COVID. When I mentioned earlier that we're going to have probably an influx of students who are seeking access to education and we might not to be able to accommodate all of those.

Is there any reason why you can't post classes or resume schedule for anyone to be able to attend if they want to? They have the ability to access those classes and you can record those classes and make them available to students afterwards. So when we're considering the technologies that you've used and the technologies that you might want to use and be interested, what you need to be thinking of what is it that I want to accomplish? Which tools afforded me the ability to accomplish this? And what are the logistics that I must consider?

And you've stated a lot of those in your responses already. So things like student access, language barriers, the digital skills that they need. But when you're thinking about what technologies to use, it's really what are my goals and what am I trying to accomplish and what are the best suited tools for doing that?

So now we're going to hop into our second activity. And this is going to be using a shared document in Google Sheets. So we're going to, I'm going to have you launched from the Wakelet activity two which is a shared Google Sheet. And what you're going to do in that Google Sheet is click on a row and you're going to enter information about a tool or tools that you currently use. So if you click on that, it's going to launch a Google search that everyone has the ability to go into and edit.

Awesome. You guys are already in there so cool. So I created an example, my name is Jeff. The thing I want to accomplish today is to train educators and have a webinar. So I'm using Zoom and what logistics must I consider? Internet connection, I have to consider that the computer is preferred but it's also accessible first by a smartphone. You must know how to join, which a lot of you already knew how to do. And right now I'm using Google Sheets and you all are hopping in. You see all these colors, that's where everyone's clicked in.

So in using this tool, one of the considerations I have to make is helping students know not to overwrite someone else's response. So pick a row, you can scroll down. Some of you clearly have are responding in that third column or the last column, excuse me, based on questions that you have gotten from students. Great place to start in terms of thinking of the logistics, right?

You can be as well planned as you want and then suddenly you start using it and there's things that you did not think of that come up. And so you'll be better off next time having that experience. But ideally we want to consider as many of these barriers or logistics ahead of time so that we're making correct selections or the best selection for our students.

So great. So a lot of you are focused on there's a conferencing apps. We see some folks using Google tools and again needing access. So access is a huge logistical consideration. It is probably the biggest, right. Google Classroom. WhatsApp. So Google Classroom I want to integrate work-based learning. Olga, I love that.

So one of the things that's great about Google Classroom is it allows us to organize and provide a home base for students. But one of the great things about it it also integrates tools such as slide's and docs and other in the Google Suite ecosystem that are work based tools. These are productivity tools that a lot of employers expect you to be able to use. So it gives you that additional affordance by using Google app.

Have my students practice their speaking. And you're using WhatsApp for that. So that's awesome and WhatsApp is a very popular tool. Engaging students in conversation. So in order to do that right now we have a webinar where there are 68 of you, right, and we're all going to be together for the whole time. But if you have a class and you wanted to provide differentiation or if you wanted to put students in different groups working on different things, Zoom allows you to create breakout rooms. And that allows students to work in small groups and you can sort of move through those. So it's a great tool that sort of simulates what you might want to do in a classroom in a virtual setting.

We did the Mentimeter poll in real time. And some of you mentioned that in the chat. Like one of the benefits of doing it in real time was that we could see people's responses. There's no reason that you couldn't send that Mentimeter link out to students before class. So that when you are coming to class, you have their responses, you've already gathered those responses, and you can kick off class looking at those responses.

So we think especially about right now where you have limited face to face time with students, the more things that you can front load ahead of a lesson particularly around sort of checks like that or getting information that you might ask at the start of class, the better. So if they're used to using a tool like Mentimeter or some other polling software, you can send those questions out ahead of time and say, give them a due date. Say we're going to kickoff class on Wednesday based on your responses.

So that's called the flipped model of instruction where you're providing them something to do ahead of time and that we can use that information at the start of class on the next time you meet. So you don't have to put a due date but I think there's limitations on the window that students can respond. But thank you for that question because it prompted me to think about something that I had forgotten to share earlier.

So in thinking about Google Sheets, we just did an activity with Google Sheets where I was asking you all to contribute into a collective document. So I want you to answer the same questions. This is the last time we answered these questions. So in the chat, what was the task that I was asking you to complete?

Now I want you to think about why I use Google Sheet for this task. If I had used the polling software, right, that polling software I had fixed answers that I wanted you to respond to. I wanted your specific answers to those questions. And so I was able to create a poll that had those sort of fixed responses.

The first question in the Mentimeter was the word cloud but because I knew you'd have one word answers. You'd be saying Kahoot! or Google Classroom or Zoom, right. So that was a good poll because we'd get that word cloud and those words getting bigger because of the fact that you were going to have this one word responses.

I used Google Sheets for this activity because all of your answers were going to be wildly different, right. And so there was no way for me to give you sort of fixed answers to select. I wanted you to have the opportunity to be able to answer in an open response environment. And I wanted to be able to work off of that to hold the discussion around the different tools that folks are using. So it gives you flexibility in using it.

And again, you can use it ahead of time. So I think you've probably already answered but in what ways was this effective tool for the task that I was doing? So we just talked about that. It gives us flexibility in our answers. It also allows you to see what other people were saying.

Now, I asked you to provide your name, one of the things that you said was a benefit of Zoom was the or, excuse me, the Mentimeter was the anonymity. I asked you to provide your name. I wouldn't have to if I didn't want to. But I was doing that so that you can claim a row and do that. But so, this gave us the ability to see each other's answers and to see others' of challenges or the logistics that they've overcome. And it allowed you to be more open response.

So what factors would need to be considered in using this tool with your learners? Deleting. Yes, that is a big one. So Google Sheets because it's a shared document, everyone has the ability to accidentally delete somebody. And someone gave the great suggestion of assigning a row in advance. So that's a tip.

If this were a tool that you would regularly use, you can pre-populated with students names because you probably already have that in a list of cells in a Google Sheet somewhere. Or you could assign students numbers and give them that. So students would need to be able to type.

It is hard to use a Google Sheet on a phone. So that's a logistical thing. It's a great tool, there's other tools which we're going to use in a second that give us some of the same affordances of sort of shared response and everyone seeing it but that are more mobile friendly.

I do, I have used Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets on a phone and it's fun but it's certainly not optimal. But you are able to do it depending on your tech level of ability. But if more of your students are using a mobile phone, then maybe Google Sheets isn't the right response. Particularly if it's going to be something that you want some immediate response.

But again, this is something that you could do ahead of time and share with them so that they have time. A great suggestion from Amy is use Google Forms. So in a very similar manner, if you had those same questions in a Google Form, I could send that out to students ahead of time or during class or after. It's a lot easier for them to enter into a Google Form.

And then if you use Google Forms before, the resulting data is actually available to you in a Google Sheet. So you're actually using Google Forms which is much more mobile friendly for students to answer those very same questions and then it will be in a Google Sheet and we can see everyone's responses. So that's an absolutely perfect suggestion, Amy, excuse me. And that's one of those considerations, right.

So if they're going to be accessing on a phone maybe Google Sheets isn't the best tool. If you have a computer lab or if they all have Chromebooks, then it is a good tool. And to one person's point within the Google Sheet, they're learning how to use productivity tools such as Google Sheets, which is obviously a set of skills that is very helpful in the workplace.

And so there's many different ways to do the same task. It's thinking about what are the things that are going to be most effective for my learners based in our current situation. So you kind of already answered this question so we're going to move on but Google Forms is another tool that you can use. We're going to do a Padlet and we're going to see the references that Padlet gives us in a second.

So that sort of transitions us into characterizing these ed tech tools. We have a number of different options for doing different things with technology and so making that selection can sometimes be challenging. This is a fun little couple of questions that I like to do when I present on integrating technology.

And so the first question just use the chat pod to answer. So most of you are saying B. It seems like a pretty straightforward response. I've B, C, D, it depends. Yes, you could technically probably get it in there with the wrench. You could technically get it in there with those pliers. But the best tool for this as we know it would B.

The best response I've ever gotten to this was we were talking about mobile tools, was using your smartphone to nail-- to hammer the nail and which probably wouldn't do very well for your smartphone. But these tools are sort of single purpose, right. Each one of these tools has a very singular purpose. So it's very clear which tool you grab for many of these tasks.

We're going to go to this next slide and the scenario here is this is a gentleman calling for the bus. And if you live in Chicago if the bus is leaving and you're running, it does not stop. So he has missed this bus and now he is going to be late for work. So which of the tools would you use in order to handle this situation in letting your employer know you'd be late?

So which tool you chose probably depends on your boss, right. There is a consideration that you have to make around the context for you and your boss, right. Now if this is a teacher say you're late for class, your boss is probably not sitting at their computer looking at email. So that is probably not the best way to operate. They probably also are not going to necessarily stop class and answer the phone mid-class.

Whereas a text which tends to be the thing that we like to use the most is sort of immediate thing that we know they're going to see. And that it might be more likely, again, depending on the person, which tool they're going to use. And this has to characterize their thinking about what tools we use. We're thinking about communication, many of you have probably started using or maybe already we're using WhatsApp and Remind because you know that texting is something that your students are more apt to do and those apps sort of involve a text based format. As opposed to email which we know a lot of students are averse to. And sometimes they just don't see the need to have an email account.

And so there's a lot of dependencies here. And I used to do a session on writing for work and talking about how we were using technology more in the realm of writing. And this was six or seven years ago. And I remember talking about texting. And it was really focused on the amount of email we get. And this is why it's important to be teaching these skills.

And at that time, I remember having the conversation where people were aghast at the notion of using texting and texting for communicating with your boss. However, now I think it is the preferred mode of communication for a lot of people. And so we need to think about that with our learners.

So I'm going to hop out of the way of the presentation again. And in your Wakelet, one of the resources that I've provided is a teacher tool page. And this is on the CrowdED learning website. Now, this was something that we had not had up on our website but realized might be very useful for educators as everyone was jumping into using new technologies and new tools.

And so on our teacher tools page, which is in our Explore section, so you see the CrowdED learning website, we've organized a bunch of different tools around their various uses. So what am I trying to do? Why am I trying to do it? And how would I use this with my students? So around video calls and meeting, around chat and messaging tools. Subject area of course classrooms so the content that you're going to be using with students. Supplemental learning content.