The 4C's in STEM: Creativity, Communication, Crticial Thinking, Collaboration

This series focuses on the 4C's in STEM.  Although STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, there is much more that contributes to developing successful students than just these core content skills.

 By focusing on the skills that employers are seeking, students can build, through technology, these 21st century skills to become well-qualified job candidates when they enter the workforce.

Here's the round-up of the apps and software that I've talked about in this series:

The 4 C's in STEM: Creativity
Infographics
Glogster EDU
Animoto
PowToon
Domo Animate

The 4 C's in STEM: Communication
Padlet
MindMap Free
TitanPad
TwistedWave
TodaysMeet

The 4 C's in STEM: Critical Thinking
Visual Ranking Tool
Google
Logic Puzzles
Wordle
Kudo

The 4 C's in STEM: Collaboration
Symphonical
Google Drive
LiveBinders
Concept Board
Wikispaces

The Four C's in STEM: Collaboration with Wikispaces

Another one of my favorite tools, Wikispaces does not disappoint. Wikispaces Classroom is an ideal tool for both teachers to create a virtual space for team work.  In minutes, students can sign up for a free account and begin collaborating.  Perfect for school projects or even eportfolios, Wikispaces provides a lot of flexibility.

Using Wikispaces, students can create attractive "web pages" containing files, pictures, videos, links and other content to support their projects or eportfolios. Students can create as many supporting pages and upload as many supporting documents as needed as long as they don't go over 20MB per file limit or 2GB capacity limit.

Students can leave comments and discuss topics in a discussion thread and teachers can easily monitor since Wikispaces saves all edits and revisions.  Wikispaces Classroom pages will even allow the teacher to organize students into groups, each with their own pages and permissions...perfect for collaboration!

The Four C's in STEM: Collaboration with Conceptboard

Collaborate visually with Conceptboard by creating an account and inviting your team mates to join.  No need for anyone else to even have an account.  Simply invite others through email or just share the link.

With the basic (free) account, students can chat with their teams and upload documents, screenshots and content from the web so that all project materials can be kept in one place. And Conceptboard automatically saves any work, so that progress won't be lost.  

This virtual whiteboard even allows students to comment and reply to anything displayed in their board to help the project move forward or just brainstorm ideas.

The Four C's in STEM: Collaboration with LiveBinders

If you are researching a specific topic, LiveBinders is an ideal place to collect all of the information you find including web sites, files, pictures and videos.

Users can create a free account, then assemble a virtual binder that can then be shared with others.  Students can invite collaborators to collect and organize their materials within their binder and even create different binders for different topics or collect binders from others using the "Add to Shelf" function.

Binders set up under a free account are limited to ten binders with a storage capacity of 100 MB, but paid accounts have higher capacities. Either way, students have plenty of space to research, collect, organize and collaborate!

The Four C's in STEM: Collaboration with Google Drive

It's no secret that I am a huge fan of Google Drive.  I use it with clients all the time to share files and pictures.  If you've not experimented with it lately, I encourage you to as Drive is free and online and contains a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation platform, form creator and drawing creator.

With Drive, collaboration could not be easier.  Students can use their software of choice and upload their document to Drive, either in its native format or to be converted to a Google format. Or, start a new document in Drive.

Once the document is in Drive, students can share it to their team to edit and revise simultaneously.  By also sharing the document with their teacher, he/she can provide comments and feedback through the comment function. After receiving a comment, students can reply for clarification or resolve the comment, thus strengthening their digital collaboration skills.

The Four C's in STEM: Collaboration with Symphonical

Symphonical is an online tool that allows students to collaborate on projects and keep track of individual tasks. Organized in an easy to use grid containing categories for Not Started, In Progress and Completed, students create notes containing tasks to move around the board, thus showing visual progress. Any task that contains a due date can then be viewed on a calendar as well.

This application does require an account, but the basic service is free. Once one account holder logs in, other team members can be invited from within the app to collaborate.

An additional feature that facilitates collaboration is the ability to invite team members to a Google Hangout from within the app so that students can discuss tasks (which can be imported from Gmail and Google Drive) and priorities.

This simple and free platform can help students get organized, prioritize tasks to achieve success for the project and best of all...collaborate!

The Four C's in STEM: Critical Thinking with Microsoft Kodu

For kids who like to design and play games, Kodu from Microsoft is a high-interest way to help develop critical thinking skills.

Kodu, a free visual programming language, allows students to build, play and optionally share their own video games with other users online.  Since the software is downloaded to each computer (the only negative for our school district friends), there are no accounts or passwords to remember.  Students simply create and explore a world, then program their character or rover.  Students can edit and save changes to make their worlds better over time too.

Not sure where to start?  Microsoft provides five one-hour lessons and even provides support videos on YouTube to help students become familiar with the interface and hit the ground running with their critical thinking skills.  Then, let the coding begin!

The Four C's in STEM: Critical Thinking with Wordle

Critical thinking encourages students to look deeply into concepts and problems.  In striving to work towards the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, students learn skills to help them analyze, question and explain.

It's tough for teachers to teach critical thinking because these skills can look like so many different thought processes in so many different scenarios.  So, how do we teach these then?  One way is to use tools like Wordle.

 Wordle can encourage critical thinking skills by helping students to make predictions, identify main ideas, and focus discussions.  Word clouds also provide students the opportunity for reflection and evaluation of text or concepts.

The Four C's in STEM: Critical Thinking with Logic Puzzles

Logic puzzles are a fun way for students to exercise critical thinking.  Using a site like Puzzle Baron or Kids Korner, students can learn more about problem solving skills by examining the puzzle clues and thinking critically about what they mean (and, in some cases, don't mean).

Critical thinking skills are tough to teach because they are not fact-based.  They require reasoning and deeper thinking and focus on the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy.

Students often struggle with critical thinking because most problems posed in the classroom only require surface-level consideration to solve or answer.  By asking students deeper questions that help them to decide, judge, or solve a problem, students can learn to think more critically.

The Four C's in STEM: Critical Thinking with Google

Critical Thinking with Google? How can using Google (or Bing) teach my students to think critically?  Wading through search results can be a daunting task for an even an adult, so teaching student how to select good, reliable and reputable sites is a must.

Anyone can host a web page.  In terms of critical thinking, being able to discern a credible web site from a fly-by-night site is an important and necessary skill.

As students look at search results, they are naturally asking themselves internal question to figure out which link to click: What web site is this from? When was this written? What credentials does this person or organization have?  According to the UC Berkley Library, examining different search results or sources allows students to employ techniques and ask a series of questions to know which pages to trust and thus help to develop more sophisticated critical thinking skills.

The Four C's in STEM: Critical Thinking with Visual Ranking Tool

Intel's Visual Ranking Tool helps students to think critically about a question or task.  Students can discuss the option and use the ranking tool to put responses in order of importance.

This free, customizable application allows the teacher to input possible solutions and discussion points or for the students to create and rank different solutions on their own.  Once students have ranked their choices, teams can compare their rankings with another team or class, thus sparking a deeper discussion on the chosen subject.

Throughout the process, the teacher can provide comments, questions for students an feedback on progress as he/she communicates with students.  And, the Visual Ranking Tool is also available on iOS and Android, to encourage mobile learning.

Want to see how it works? Check out the pre-loaded demo.

The Four C's in STEM: Communication with TodaysMeet

If you have not used a backchannel while attending a lecture or seminar, backchannels are a way for participants to interact with the main conversation simultaneously. Like an encouraged form of passing notes in class, except for the fact that all these notes are posted in a forum and directly related to the day's seminar or lecture.

TodaysMeet is one such example.  Before the lecture, workshop, or seminar, access the site and name your "room" and select how long the data should be stored.  This creates your very own URL that you can share with attendees who can then access a very clean chat screen to comment.

It's that simple.  No accounts to create, no passwords to remember. And the best part is that anyone can access a transcript to remember what has been discussed (or keep track of student participation or...ahem...appropriate and on-task comments.)

Starfish Education is not affiliated with these companies or organizations and is not compensated in any way for posting about their company or online tools.

The Four C's in STEM: Communication with TwistedWave

TwistedWave is very similar to Audacity in that it's a free audio editor and recorder, but unlike Audacity, there is no software to install.  Students simply access the site and begin a new document.  Students can also create an optional account that allows students to record for a couple of hours, and keep up to 20 minutes of content.

Once there, students can record their work and easily download the file into common formats like WAV, MP3, or WMA.  Students can even upload the file to Dropbox.

Using TwistedWave as an editor, students can upload a supported file type and use the Audacity-like interface to edit using features like fading, looping and other effects that will assist students in communicating creatively and effectively.

Starfish Education is not affiliated with these companies or organizations and is not compensated in any way for posting about their company or online tools.

The Four C's in STEM: Communication with TitanPad

TitanPad is an online tool that allows students to craft a document simultaneously.  The beauty of this free online app is that each student s assigned a different color, so when each student types or edits, the text reflects their chosen highlight color.

While students work to build a document, they can chat on the right hand side of the screen to discuss possible edits, revisions,etc.  They can export to a text file, a PDF, or even export the file to finish it up in a word processing program like Microsoft Word. If necessary, students can even import a file to continue working.

One unique feature called Time Slider allows students to use a slider bar to playback the changes that were made. Although it is not packed with bells and whistles, it does provide the basics to enable student communication.

Starfish Education is not affiliated with these companies or organizations and is not compensated in any way for posting about their company or online tools.

The Four C's in STEM: Communication with MindMapFree

In discussing online communication tools, it's hard not to include a concept map.  We use them so much in education to help students to brainstorm and think through their ideas, so it seems only natural to include one on our list.

The concept map that I like the best is MindMapFree.  MindMapFree is, as it states, free.  It is also completely online with no login required (or even offered).

This application is easy enough for younger students to grasp quickly and robust enough for older students to add all of the elements they need.

Even though no login capability is provided, users have the option of saving their map into Dropbox, into your browser's local storage, or downloading the file to your desktop in a proprietary file format.  The file can easily be uploaded again so that students can continue from where they left off.

Starfish Education is not affiliated with these companies or organizations and is not compensated in any way for posting about their company or online tools.

The Four C's in STEM: Communication with Padlet

Padlet (formerly Wallwisher) is a dynamic way for students to brainstorm and collect ideas for a project.  Acting like a virtual bulletin board, this online app allows users to create digital sticky notes and arrange them on the canvas.

Part of the beauty of this application is that users don't need to create an account, although opting to create one provides additional features like being able to post to the wall for more than 24 hours and toggle back and forth between different walls.

 Whether an account is created or not, users can share their walls to social media, embed it into another site, or use the provided QR code to access the wall on a phone or tablet. Users can even select a custom URL to make it easier to remember.

Padlet also has a export function, allowing users to export their wall as a PDF, excel file, or a host of other very useful formats that further communication amongst team members.

Starfish Education is not affiliated with these companies or organizations and is not compensated in any way for posting about their company or online tools.

The Four C's in STEM: Creativity with Domo Animate

In this series, we're examining different online resources that can help students explore their creativity when working in a STEM classroom.

So far, we've talked about Infographics, Glogster EDU, Animoto and PowToon.   This week's creativity tool for STEM is Domo Animate.

Domo Animate is a comic strip creator that can be used to extend students' digital literacy skills.  Students can create their own comic strip using stock scenes, characters, props and speech bubbles.  For added effects, students can add extra touches like music and special effects.  Created cartoons can be shared via email, social networks or embedded in another site.

Domo Animate can be a powerful tool to help students be more creative as they work through STEM projects.

Starfish Education is not affiliated with these companies or organizations and is not compensated in any way for posting about their company or online tools.