C4T Summary Teacher #3

Mr. Wickens works in the Physical Education department at Loughborough University. In the first post of his that I read, Guided Access on iOS in Education, he explains that there is an app that will allow certain programs to lock once you open them, meaning that once they are open, they can't be closed without a specific code. This is beneficial in the classroom because students can't exit from whatever it is they are supposed to be working on and get off task. Not only that, but the app also allows you to disable certain areas of the screen. This comes in handy because it gives the students a little more freedom, but they still can't access certain things that you don't want them to if you have the applications locked. I believe that this is an excellent tool; it lets the kids be more independent and keeps the teacher from having to worry about them wasting their learning time on things that they shouldn't.

The next post, Google Chrome in Education, gives us insight to the many benefits of using Google Chrome. You can have as many different user accounts as you want and personalize them to make them accessible to whatever you need. In essence, it puts all of your educational resources right at your fingertips. To me, this is just one more step to make technology user friendly and help it meet the needs of everyone. These tools that Mr. Wickens has brought to light are giving school systems every reason to want to include technology to give students a better educational experience.