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Makerspaces in Schools – Trend or Necessity?

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Jmyjmyz814 [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] The ‘most impactful technologies are those that bring information closer to us, support sharing, and offer more visceral learning experiences‘ (Bower, 2017, p. 405). At the same, the effective utilisation of such technologies largely depends on educators ‘preparedness and propensity’ (ibid., p. 415). Thus, teachers are required to constantly explore technologies from a critical stance, particularly emerging ones, to provide their students with the best possible learning environments. EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium (NMC) have identified in their last report on major trends in K-12 education the implementation of makerspaces in school as an important development (Freeman et al., 2017). Although makerspaces already started to emerge in the educational context some years ago and one can rather refer to it as a strategy than a technology, it is still an ongoing trend supporting the use of different k...
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Mobile Learning in Primary School – More than a Puppet Show?

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If we want to implement mobile learning in school, either the institution has to provide the devices or students have to be allowed to bring their own smartphones or iPads to school (BYOD). Furthermore, the school’s policies have to allow the usage of mobile devices and applications in particular. Actually, data privacy can become a big issue (Bower, 2017). Nevertheless, if those hurdles have been cleared, teachers should try to explore how free apps can contribute to improving student learning. I wondered which app I could use in primary school to foster more creative and collaborative learning. Falloon and Khoo (2014) investigated in a study how the app Puppet Pals HD can contribute to that, especially to student talk. Puppet Pals HD can be deployed for students as a ‘Learning Skills App […] with the accurate environment to construct their learning‘ (Domingo & Garganté, 2016, p. 23). The app offers the possibility to create animated short videos with different puppet characters ...
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Google Hangouts – A Tool for Intercultural Communication in the EFL Classroom

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Web 2.0 tools have two major advantages: They can be accessed from nearly everywhere and by everyone, and their variety harbours a lot of possibilities to enhance learning processes (Bower, 2015). On the other hand, it can feel like there are too many options and issues that have to be considered wisely in order to support student learning. As pointed out by Bower (2015), in the first place, we have to understand what Web 2.0 technologies are if we want to exploit them successfully for our teaching. He defines Web 2.0 technologies as  openly available online technologies that allow creation, editing and sharing of digital content between (often large) groups via a web-browser (Bower, 2016, p. 162). Additionally, Bower’s typographical analysis of Web 2.0 technologies (2015) builds a helpful framework to get an overview and decide on which technologies might be the best fit for the next teaching project. Since it benefits me a lot educationally, especially ling...
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OER Commons – A Useful (Re)Source for Planning an Art Lesson?

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Planning an art lesson can sometimes be nerve-wracking if one aims to provide the students with engaging activities that foster creativity and enhance learning. So how can educators use technology to find reliable resources for their lessons? As Bower (2017) states teachers ‘often draw from open websites, blogs, YouTube, and a range of other online resources that have not necessarily been created for educational purposes let alone a specific learning activity’ (p. 112). To focus on resources that are particularly aligned with educational needs, Open Educational Resources (OERs) seem to be the right choice. Bissel (2009) as cited in Bower (2017) determines OERs as ‘digiti[s]ed materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research’ (p. 97). A database for discovering OERs suited for primary education as well as all other levels of education is OER Commons: https://www.oercommons.org. To find a resour...
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Kahoot! From a Behaviourist to a Social Constructivist Perspective: Enhancing Learning in the Primary EFL Classroom

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Alpeque [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] Kahoot! has meanwhile become a quite well-known online platform for game-based learning, one can also refer to it as a „student response system” (Licorish et al., 2018, p. 1). The teacher just has to sign up for free to prepare a quiz tailored to the students‘ learning needs. To start the quiz the teacher projects it on a screen. The students themselves can simply join the game via a pin code on a device with online access (most probably the traditional PC, an iPad or smartphone). As soon as the questions pop up on the shared screen, all players choose between four possible answers highlighted in different colours on their own device (Kahoot, 2019).  I first used Kahoot! in a German primary school for EFL teaching by creating vocabulary quizzes for my class. I displayed either the German or English words, or simply pictures so that the students had to choose the corresponding vocabulary. From a peda...
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