Each year teachers in my school gather together to discuss their uses of technology. For many this is a joy; for some it is a compulsion. The best examples start, as ever, with what thinking is needed by the students. These examples also harness the expertise and experience of the teacher. Such technology that does this, such as recording and screencasting technology, then becomes integral to the pedagogic rhythms of the classroom. It is a novelty no longer, and certainly not something to merely prove a use of technology to faceless others – a base instigation.
With this in mind, our department this year has continued with our use of Triptico. It is still the most integrated and responsive English app available.
The grouping app is its best feature for me. Being able to allocate students to pairs or other groups, and to select students at will or random, provokes social connections where necessary.
The word magnet app is a great way to teach clarity in sentence construction, especially when moving clauses in sentences. In systems where grammar has been contentiously undertaught, this is real boon for teachers.
The Slow Writing app continues to work well, instigating students to craft sentences and use the kind of techniques that make examiners tick. Combined with genre-specific methods of writing, this can stretch the most able as well.
The ranking app was used in our recent inspection to written plaudits. The issue, as always, in using technology is that it risks becoming task-based, and then even mere substitution for another task. This is a common criticism of the early school technology integration models once produced but now widely discredited. The ranking app, however, puts thinking and evaluation of ideas at the heart of its functionality: while one could simply take pieces of paper and stick them on a board and move them around, the ability to do so with the ease of this app is duly transformational. And that’s not the mention the satisfying ‘click!’ when an idea falls into place.
If you are looking for a way to trial this app, contact David at https://www.tripticoplus.com/index.php.
