Education 2.0 & 3.0

The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework allows us to understand the importance of utilizing web 2.0 in teaching and learning. Social annotation tools such as Hypothes.is allow teachers to fulfil the three essential UDL components: engagement, representation, and action & expression through thoughtful use of the platform.

Social annotation tools such as Hypothesis and Voice Thread, when used well, boost student engagement, enhance critical thinking, expand reading comprehension, and increase student interaction. Of the several social annotation tools currently available, our institution uses Hypothesis. Hypothesis’ motto—“Making reading active, visible and social”—sums up why we think social annotation is so valuable for our students: it engages students and invites them to read and think together as a group by sharing real-time annotations of websites or PDFs (Hypothesis, 2021). The richly multimodal, interactive nature of Hypothesis offers instructors a platform through which they can employ the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) to improve engagement and accessibility for all learners.

Recently featured in more than 12 App Stores, Markup is a widely recognized web and document annotator developed by Kdan Mobile. You can use it to leverage the educational potential of the digital web, enhance your overall productivity, and boost quality study time. Markup allows you to easily highlight anything you want on various multimedia materials that include PDFs, web pages, blog posts, articles, and ePub books. 

Summarize news articles, blog posts, and videos and AI will extract the key sentences

Checking the papers of your students can take a lot of time.

Depending on the subject and the discipline in question, you may spend hours evaluating the work your class has done. This has always been a typical problem for teachers everywhere, and it might have gotten worse with the advancement of plagiarism. Now you not only have to check papers for their correspondence with your requirements. You need to make sure that the writing is original—otherwise, all your further actions will become worthless.

MindMeister is one of our favourite tools for creating mind maps on Google Drive. It provides users with an intuitive brainstorming platform where they can discuss projects, sketch out plans, and collaborate in real-time.

There's no shortage of options for sharing documents and more with friends, family, and colleagues. These are your best bets.

Earlier this week I published a video about a neat new service called Transo that lets you turn your notes into a mind map with just one click. Creating that video and writing the corresponding blog post got me to revisit a list of mind mapping tools that I published a couple of months ago. Here's my updated list of mind mapping and flowchart creation tools.