Monday, November 3, 2014

What's in the Ed Tech Graveyard?



What technologies are in your Ed Tech Graveyard?  Which ones are on their last breath or have a short life expectancy?  Submit them here.

Last week, right before Halloween, I took some time to remove some old Outlook email folders. These are folders with emails I haven't looked at for years. Purging old folders and files and sorting through emails that I kept years ago but no longer need is nothing I regularly spend time doing. In today's day and age where storage is seemingly limitless, the need to do this to free up space on a computer is almost nonexistent. I certainly remember a time where space was limited and it was necessary to delete old files or receive an error message stating warning of exceeding storage limits.  But these folders were clogging up my screen vertical real estate and cluttering my view so I finally did something to fix that. (Side note: we use Outlook email, which in some ways is a dying product in and of itself. Many schools have moved to Gmail...) 

I was surprised to discover a large number of Ed Tech Tools that are no longer used in our school district, including some that I'd long forgotten.  Some might still be in use in small pockets, but we're no longer offering training and promoting them:


Blackboard LMS, Respondus, StudyMate, PhotoStory, Making the Grade, Google Gadgets, Google Wave, Pinnacle, Kidspiration, Inspiration, Destinations Reading, Destino Lectura, Kerpoof, Tux Paint, KidPix, FrontPage, Lync, Quizdom, TurningPoint, Senteo, Airliners, SMART Tables, Type to Learn, Typing Pal, Zoomerang


So on Halloween, as I was walking around with my kids, I noticed the various decorations, including some neighbors with tombstones making their front yards look like a graveyard. Thinking about this upcoming post and my earlier experience ridding my email account of unused folders from long dead programs, it made me wonder what other technology tools are which have passed on in other schools, or perhaps are on their deathbed having difficulties breathing? Please enter your submissions here. It's a short Google form where you can either claim a cemetery plot or just let the caretaker know to be ready. The results of this form are listed here and I'll display in a Wordle soon. 


(If you know how to automatically generate a WordCloud or something similar from a Google Spreadsheet, please let me know.  Now that Google Gadgets are in the Ed Tech Graveyard, I'm not sure how to do it!)


I think it would be helpful to see a collective crowd sourced list of educational technologies that are in or headed to the graveyard in other schools.  If we're still using them it might be time to take a look and reconsider other tools and better options. Thanks for your help and participation!




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