Overview

Creating your own teaching materials and lessons takes time, and putting them on the web, where students can access them from anywhere and any time, can be even more time-consuming.  But there are easy-to-use and mostly free tools which can minimize the time and tech experience required while adding interactivity, organization and variety to your lessons and saving paper.

The first step, obviously, is to become familiar with the various tools available.  A basic principle is that the easiest tools are the most inflexible; the more flexibility a tool offers, the steeper the learning curve.

As we become familiar with the tools, we need to become savvy consumers of tech.

1. Don't use tech for its own sake.  Use it when it enhances the lesson.

2. Start from your teaching objectives.

3. Choose the tools that are the most appropriate for the functions you need.

Here's an activity to give you practice considering and balancing the issues involved in "tool selection".

To help you with this activity, we have produced some charts that summarize the tools covered this week.

Marlene's is in alphabetical order.

Rick's is sorted by type of media and/or product.

Finally, there's a visual chart for people who like things organized that way.

If you're really inspired (and talented), and especially if you chafe at the restrictions imposed by the tools we've taught you, you can consider writing your own code to build your own computer lessons from scratch.  Guidance and inspiration in that direction is found in Handout #20:  Multimedia from Scratch.

Good luck!