Just Because There is an App... The Past Year-and-a-Half has Taught Me a Number of Things: Part 2

Just Because There is an App, It Doesn’t Mean I Need to Use It

*Schoology

*Zoom

*Infinite Campus

*Google Docs

Google Forms

Google Slides

Google Hangouts

Google Assignments

Padlet

FlipGrid

Grammarly

PearDeck

Edpuzzle

Kahoot

Edmodo

ClassKick

Nearpod

These are the names of some of the apps that were presented to me this past year. I could probably think of more if I really put my mind to it. Let’s just agree that there were a lot!

This past year-and-a-half has taught me that there is always a new app. Whenever a need arises, someone has created an app to deal with it. We heard about new apps and new things we could use nearly every time we met as a staff. That is fascinating. People who design these things are brilliant. I have no idea how they do what they do. I tried most of these apps. I felt overwhelmed at the sheer number of logins—user names and passwords. I came to realize that the ever-growing list was too much. It was too much to juggle as I tried to navigate the world of our hybrid classroom.

My students felt the same way. They had become immersed in a year where school was about learning new information, and also about learning how to use tech tools, and also about managing their time as adults, and also about remembering an endless list of logins. Some were brought to tears. This overload was exhausting. It caused unnecessary stress in many of my students. It caused other students to give up. My students were overwhelmed. And sadly, it was not the actual school workload that was causing them stress. It was an over-load of technology. They found that they didn’t know “where to go for what”.

So, early on in the school year, I made a promise to myself and to them. I would not use most of the apps on this list. I would not introduce any more new apps to them. In my class, we would use only those apps listed with an asterisk. The first three of these were decided upon by our school district. Google Docs is simply a good way to have my students share what they write with me. My students would only need to remember one log-in. I would not ask them to go to another site, another app, or another place for our classroom. I also used Google Slides and Google Forms, but I did not ask my students to create with these. I used them, and my students merely opened them. They calmed down. So did I.

I found out that just because there is an app, it doesn’t mean I need to use it.