Vicki Curtis

ESL Instructor at Ohlone College

Bio

Just an educator who loves learning and using technology to connect and grow.

I teach: ESL

To ages: 19 to 22

Reviews

April 18, 2015

I absolutely love Otus! I can’t live without it in my BYOD classroom. It is the central hub for my students to access assignments, their calendar, and tests. It is very easy to use on both the teacher and student side. I teach ESL at a community college and have an Otus class for each of my sections. I am able to add all types of multi-media content which isn’t always the case with some classroom management tools. I’d love to see the calendar feature have the ability to add links, and I’d like to see the messaging feature be more intuitive and Facebook-like. As it still isn’t, I hold onto my Facebook groups for quick easy communication. It would also be great if students could easily upload content to share with the class. Overall, it is a terrific device-agnostic classroom management tool.

April 18, 2015

I tried Sway in my classes to create collaborative presentations Because many of my students use iPads and Google Slides just isn’t easy to use on an iPad. Sway worked beautifully, and the students found it very easy to use. The only hiccup came when a few of my students were unable to create Microsoft accounts. They ran out of times to try and had to wait until the next day to make accounts. Once they had accounts it worked very smoothly. I think this is a great tool for BYOD classrooms since it works well with everything. The only caveat I have is that while it is free now, knowing the Microsoft trend, I’m afraid it will eventually be fee-based. We will have to see when the Beta ends.

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