IT Tools at Champlain

Person using laptop Source: Flickr Copyright - Rawpixel Ltd

Source: Flickr, Copyright – Rawpixel Ltd

What is Information Technology (aka IT)?

This page will give you some ideas about the use of Information Technology (IT) in your teaching, the types of IT tools that are available in most classrooms at Champlain and how you can use it to support student learning.

6 Questions to Consider:

  • What IT is available in your college?
  • What IT knowledge and skills do your students have?
  • How can you use IT to help your students learn?
  • Do you have to use IT?
  • When should you use IT?
  • Why should you use IT?

Why Use IT in Teaching? & What are the Benefits?

There are two main reasons:

  1. There are amazing amounts of high quality information and tools available through IT to make our courses more relevant and effective for our students
  2. Our students will need to use IT in their working lives: in any profession, or in any form of future education

The Benefits of Using IT in the College Classroom

  • Allows you, the instructor, to bring the world into the classroom
  • Allows you to communicate with students outside of class
  • Allows students to communicate with each other outside of class

What is the Secret to Using IT Effectively?

Think of it this way – All technology is just a tool. Pencils, pens, crayons, chalk, white board markers and Microsoft Word are all writing tools or writing technologies. Knives, forks and spoons are eating tools or technologies. Would you use a fork to eat soup? Would you use a spoon to cut meat? Would you use a pencil to write on a white board? Would you use chalk to write an essay?

Every tool is designed to achieve a purpose. This is exactly the same with information technology. The secret to using IT effectively is to choose the right tool for the right job. In and out of the classroom the job or purpose of using technology is to make the students’ learning more effective. Therefore, if a pencil is the best tool to help the students learn the knowledge and skills of our courses, then we should get our students using pencils: we have to help the students use the most useful tool for the learning job.

So, What is IT? Basically it is any tool that allows teachers and students to:

  • Get educationally valuable information
  • Present educationally valuable information
  • Do educationally valuable tasks
  • Communicate with each other to facilitate learning

The most valuable IT tool that we have is a computer. We can use all types of software on a computer, and via the Internet get access to unbelievable amounts of high quality information to support our students’ learning. But, what IT can we use?

What IT is Available in the College?

It’s time to be a detective. You can’t use IT that is not available in your college. A good way to think about this is to divide IT into hardware and software: hardware usually gives us access to software. Below are some questions to get you thinking about what is available in your college.

Questions to ask…

  • Is there a teacher’s computer in your classroom?
  • Does this computer have access to the Internet? And, is access to the Internet reliable and fast enough?
  • Is there a projector connected to the teacher’s computer?
  • Do the students have access to computers in the classroom?
  • Are the computers powerful/fast enough to do the learning task?
  • Is their WiFi in the classroom?
  • Do the students have access to the Internet?
  • Are there computer labs that you can book and use in college?
  • Are there computers that the students can use in college: maybe in a computer lab or in the library?
  • Is there WiFi in certain parts of the college?
  • Do I need something other than a computer to teach my course (a TV, a VCR/DVD, video cameras, cameras, telephones, language labs…) and are these available in college?

What can I Use IT Tools For?

Our main job as teachers-course designers is to choose the most useful IT tool for the teaching or learning task that we are trying to achieve. Let’s make this very clear at the start: If IT won’t help your students’ learn the required knowledge and skills of your course, then don’t use it! 

In saying this, there are amazing amounts of IT tools that we can purchase or download for free that can be used to help us design courses or use in the classroom. Here we will introduce you to some of the more commonly used IT tools and how we can use them to support the learning of our students. This is not a complete list of tools and some tools can be used for more than one purpose. We have divided this section into sections. The sections are based on what the IT can be best used for.

Extend Your Learning 

  • Developing Effective Questions for Online Discussions – The forums in an online course are the primary places for community, coaching, collaborating, thinking.
  • How can I compose groups? – Group composition affects many aspects of a group project, such as how efficiently group members work together and how much relevant knowledge they can share.
  • What is Netiquette? – “Netiquette” is network etiquette, the do’s and don’ts of online communication. Netiquette covers both common courtesy online and the informal “rules of the road” of cyberspace.
  • Survey Monkey – Free IT tool for creating surveys/questions
  • iClicker – Allows students to use their cellphones as a clicker.
  • Gapminder for Teachers – This site that has amazing amounts of accurate information about our world
  • Prezi – An alternative presentation software
  • Cmaps – Free concept mapping software
  • Top 200 Tools for Learning 2017 – This site shows the top 100 IT tools that can be used to support your teaching and your students’ learning
  • Weebly is a complete platform that allows anyone to start and grow an online business with curated website templates, powerful ecommerce and integrated marketing
  • TED-Ed supports learning — from producing a growing library of original animated videos, to providing an international platform for teachers to create their own interactive lessons
  • Refer to Garr Reynolds website to learn more about how to prepare, design and deliver powerful presentations