Great ideas from ECIS IT conference

A few days ago I returned from the IT conference of ECIS. There were many excellent presentations with ideas I shall follow up and I have brought back two particular suggestions which may interest ISL teachers.

Doctopus

Doctopus and Goobric
Here's how it works, all within Google Drive:

• you share an assignment with all of the students in a class.
• All of the students receive the instructions and the rubric in their Drive.
• Each student's work is automatically shared with the teacher.
• All the work for the assignment is organised in a single folder (no chasing of students to submit; it's already there).
• The teacher comments and grades on the student's document.
• The students receive the comments and grading (indicated on a copy of the rubric)
• The work can be graded more than once (eg for a draft and final copy)

The next time you give work to the same class, or use the same rubric again, it remembers all of the details.

Goobric

If I were to use Doctopus and Goobric, it would be for activities such as assessed essays, IB internal assessments, but also for any work which required feedback and simple organisation of all of its components. Great for teachers; great for students.

Doctopus and Goobric are so-called add-ons for Google Drive. If you would like to try them out to see if they could help you in your work, I am very eager to assist teachers to set them up. Please let me know if you have an upcoming student project and we can see how it works for you.

Kiva.org

My second suggestion, which is very different, is kiva.org. This is an innovative kind of aid organisation which gives micro-finance loans to projects around the world. The loans are crowd-funded in $25 units and 99% are paid back. After this, you can donate, re-invest or reclaim your money.

Kiva U is the educational arm of kiva.org through which your class or another student group can manage donations. You can use the website to research and choose your borrower. Once the money is lent, you can follow the progress of your borrower. There are also many opportunities to skype with people on the ground.

If you would like to discuss the possibilities for you and your class, please let me know. I have two coupons for 25 dollar loans which are already paid for and which an interested class could begin with, rather than risk their own money.