CEDo 515 - Post 5

One of the most important things that we are doing this week is learning how to evaluate software to see if it is a good educational tool before we use it in the classroom. I often try to make use of software or an application before I really evaluate it. Often times, I sort of evaluate it as I am trying to make use of it for the first time. This has the tendency to waste a lot of time and energy. Now after having learned and found some good ways to evaluate software, I can save myself a lot of time and frustration when preparing new software for class use. One example of this was that I wanted to start using our new laptops more often by using the Google package of applications. Once I started trying to lay things out and start planning for class, I realized that a lot of the Google applications ran very slowly or disconnected very often on my school's network. If they did this for a teacher, they would almost certainly be completely unworkable on for a student. After wasting time on this I decided to make use of the student learning community tools that the district has available for all teachers to use with their students. This moves much faster and is very easy for the students to get used to because they have either already used it, or just because it is fairly easy to use. I would still like to try to work Google in with them because it is something that they could use out in the real world.