New Education-Related Tools

Last month I attended the Consumer Electronics Show, the largest annual convention held in Las Vegas. The 2012 CES featured more than 2,700 vendors, 1.8 million square feet of exhibits and 140,000 attendees. While there were many, many interesting new products, redesigned products and vendors that spent time talking to people about their products. For me, the interesting part of the activity was speaking with educators that are now using some of these new products in their classrooms or learning environments and finding out the effect of their use on their teaching and student learning. The Education-related products I found most interesting were:

  • LectureTools is a web-based product that allows you to prepare interactive lectures and elicit real-time feedback via the internet. Students can view them on a computer or smartphone. Most of the educators found this product as useful in both asynchronous and synchronous environment.
  • MyScript from Vision Objects in France are products that convert handwritten notes and equations to text on smartphones and tablets. In speaking with several high school teachers, the general consensus was the assisting students with the translating and converting equation and texts to other apparatus.
  • Although there were eight teachers with whom I discussed these items, I would be interested in knowing if others are using either or both of these products and the experiences they have had with them.
    Gladys Phillips-Evans
    CSTA Board Member