Tag: Schule

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Toolboxes – an overview of overviews

There are now so many digital tools, apps, programs and platforms for digital teaching and learning that it can be difficult to choose. Annotated overviews, websites and toolboxes are intended to make this selection easier and to make applications easier to find. We have tried out and compared some of them.


1. Find my Tool

FindMyTool originated as a collaborative tool on Github and includes over 800 tools as of today. The filterable collection in the form of tiles is available in German, is constantly being expanded and updated, and allows suggestions. The use is free and possible without registration.

  1. Digitale Tools – eine Übersicht

The bildung.digital list is aimed specifically at schools and teachers and is organized by application area. Only tools recommended by the editorial team are presented. The list is free of charge and available in German without registration.

3. Portal:Tools

Portal:Tools is designed by Martin Luther University Halle for university teaching as a filterable table and presents a large selection of corresponding tools in German. There is the possibility to suggest tools and the use is free of charge without registration.

4. Tool-Sammlung

The digital tool collection from Hochschulforum Digitalisierung is the result of a community survey. The list includes a selection of tools for online events and is organized by application area. The list is free and available in German without registration.

  1. alternativeTo.net

On the crowd-sourced website AlternativeTo.net, users can search specifically for alternatives to a particular tool. The website displays descriptions and user comments about each tool and lets you filter the provided overview of alternatives by platform, features and license. It is available free of charge and without registration in English.

These examples differ, among other things, in their structure and focus such as specific topics or teaching/learning contexts. We are happy about all solutions that help to make tools findable and to decide consciously and criterion-guided for or against certain tools.

Like quite a few other OER projects, some overviews are funded by third party funding or limited by a funding line, so hosting may not be taken over in the long term (think of the wonderful OER Worldmap, which is unfortunately no longer available). With the idea of being able to optimize and administer an overview in the long term, the OESA Toolbox was created in May 2020 during the hackathon “Wir hacken das digitale Sommersemester” (We hack the digital summer semester) by the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung (Higher Education Forum Digitization) as a volunteer-organized and independent project. It is intended as a filterable overview that can be used to search specifically for tools, categories, settings and functions. If a tool is missing from the overview, a new line can be added without registration and tracking, and we add any fields that may have been left empty. We host the toolbox in Germany and have provided a manual with ideas for didactic use under an open license (CC-BY-SA).

Looking to the future, we want to help optimize existing offerings and make interfaces available. For example, we are curious to see how the national education platform can advise teachers and learners in the search for and selection of suitable applications.

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Surveys, polls and quizzes in (digital) educational settings: alternatives to Doodle

Surveys and didactics

Digital teaching via Zoom or similar can quickly become passive and monotonous. In order to avoid the transfer of frontal teaching into the digital format and to reduce the inhibition threshold for participation in digital teaching, survey tools can be integrated as didactic means in the common video conferencing tools. These can be used flexibly and are a simple means of activating learners. Classically, surveys are used in teaching for knowledge or opinion polling. Thus, with the help of online or live surveys, knowledge can be checked or opinions can be obtained in real time in the classroom. This form of interactivation is particularly suitable offline and online for involving the large group or the plenum. The process is simple: surveys can be created and enabled in advance or live in the session, and respondents answer by clicking a link or QR code via smartphone or computer. In the process, the video conference management can decide whether voting should be anonymous or whether the names of the participants should be visible to everyone or only to themselves. The results of the poll are output in real time. In addition, polling tools can be used in class or course scheduling or to help assign topics for assignments, presentations or papers. Real-time questioning via a Twitter wall also provides a nice change of pace. Formats such as Tweedback digitally collect questions that lecturers can respond to later. Keyword collections and ideas can be designed as digital card queries with tools such as Oncoo – this works very similarly to the analog collection of topics on moderation cards. When integrating survey tools, many instructors turn to Doodle.

Criticism of Doodle

Doodle seems to be a simple solution: Commonly known and easy to use. However, the platform is problematic in terms of data protection, because Doodle is based outside the EU. In the free Doodle account, surveys are not SSL-encrypted, i.e. personal data is transmitted transparently and not protected from external access. In addition, Doodle allows advertisements from Google (AdSense) in its surveys. So at the latest when it comes to use in a school context and the online safety of children and young people, it becomes critical. Therefore, in the following we present safe alternatives that are free and partly open. Note: Free and open are not necessarily the same thing.

  1. Pingo

The open source application Pingo was developed by the University of Paderborn and made available free of charge. Hosted in Germany, the tool can be used to create simple surveys to query the state of knowledge or gather feedback. Since it is a university project, the operators themselves also offer didactic advice here on how to best integrate the tool into teaching.

  1. LamaPoll

The survey tool LamaPoll can be used to create simple polls and polls as well as scheduling and scientific questionnaires. The service is DSGVO compliant and does not collect IP addresses or other personal data.

  1. Nuudel

The non-tracking survey tool Nuudel is offered free of charge by the non-profit association Digitalcourage e.V. and can be used primarily for opinion polls and voting. Nuudel is based on the free software Framadate and runs on the association’s hardware. Server and software are protected from external access and no IP addresses are stored, only the answers in the polls. Registration is not required and instead of an email address, anything can be typed in.

  1. Tweedback

The survey tool Tweedback can also be used anonymously, since users do not have to register with an e-mail address and no IP addresses are permanently stored. Instead, only the most necessary data is stored on servers located in Germany. In the basic version, Tweedback offers the functions chatwall, quiz and panic button.

We have explained these functions in more detail in a tutorial on YouTube. In it, we introduce you to the survey tools Tweedback, Pingo and Kahoot! and compare them based on their scope of use, GDPR compliance and possible uses.

You’d rather get an overview yourself? In our toolbox you can compare the survey tools mentioned and many more and filter them by different features.

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Criteria for good OER

In our last article, we presented various funding models for open textbooks and showed how easy it can be to integrate Open Educational Resources (OER) into everyday school practices. However, with regard to textbooks, there is still skepticism on the part of teachers: Compared to proofread textbooks, there is sometimes a fear of loss of quality, because there is no higher authority (such as usually the publishing industry) that checks the OER materials with expertise. Although it should be noted here that for the most part, publisher review is only concerned with whether textbooks are curriculum compliant. In the case of open educational materials, publishing staff are replaced by members of online communities who share their professional and instructional knowledge to evaluate existing materials and identify specific materials for closer scrutiny. The quality of OER materials is derived from the basic ideas of open thinking and can be assessed using the following OER-specific quality criteria:

  1. Low-threshold

OER should be easy to access and understand. In terms of content, the materials are designed to be low-threshold through simple language and formats that appeal to multiple senses (e.g., video with subtitles). The temporal and spatial low-threshold nature of the OER materials is ensured by the decentralized nature of the Internet. The materials can be accessed at any time from any location, provided an Internet connection is available.

2. Accessibility

But making educational materials and offerings available online is only the first step. Access to educational materials is still often restricted or at least made more difficult by paid offerings and the condition of registration. The same applies to the provision of materials in exclusively proprietary and closed file formats (e.g., a worksheet only as a PDF). Access to OER should therefore be non-binding and unconditional, and ideally also free of charge, in order to reach everyone. More specifically, there must be different access points to the learning content as well as different teaching formats.

3. Customizability

If teachers have now found open teaching materials online, they are still faced with the problem that these are often not one hundred percent suitable for their purposes and must be adapted either in terms of layout, content or file format. Depending on the license form, however, the freedom of usability is quite limited (e.g. CC BY-ND, i.e. attribution and no editing as a default). Other Creative Commons license forms (e.g., CC ZERO) allow adaptation, remixing, and use of parts of other open materials to create new OER. The ideal forms of licensing for OER are therefore CC ZERO, CC BY, and CC BY-NC, as they are the most open and thus offer the greatest creative freedom.

4. Safety

In order to be able to use the OER in a legally secure way, they should be visibly and correctly labeled with a license (e.g. a CC license). This is because missing information means that they cannot or may not be used. If, on the other hand, sources are carefully indicated and changes to the source material are documented in such a way that they can be viewed by all users, long-term use and further development is made possible. If the rights of use are clearly and completely stated, OER materials can be used without hesitation.

In short, OER should be easily accessible and easy to use in a legally compliant manner, as well as flexible and adaptable, saving time and money and promoting educational equity.

This topic has already been discussed many times – here we have compiled more in-depth information:

Sources:

1 https://wb-web.de/material/medien/qualitat-von-offenen-bildungsmaterialien-einschatzen.html

2 https://www.bpb.de/mediathek/video/234998/oer-erklaert-ueber-die-qualitaet-der-materialien/

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Financing models for open textbooks

In 2017, Maximilian Heimstädt and Leonhard Dobusch presented their study “Perspectives of Open Educational Resources (OER) for (socio-) economic education at schools in NRW and in Germany“, formulating various models for funding OER textbooks. The study, which addresses educational policy in North Rhine-Westphalia, presents the current state of school education in NRW in 2017 as well as the challenges of digitization processes and develops solution proposals from the perspective of Open Educational Resources (OER). The central proposal of the study, in order to avoid untested, tendentious online materials in teaching, is the systematic promotion of the creation of official OER textbooks, which can be distributed, modified and recombined in a legally secure manner and have passed the quality test of the state of NRW. For this purpose, the authors design different scenarios for the (financial) promotion of textbooks under free license:

  1. Call for proposals for pilot textbooks

Significantly more OER textbooks are pre-funded through public calls for tender. The concept has low implementation hurdles and ties in directly with successful OER projects. In Norway, for example, approximately 20 percent of the textbook budget – or 8.2 million Euros – has been invested in the development of OER materials since 2006. Following this example, the OER stock and corresponding competencies at publishing houses could be successively increased.

  1. Usage-based refinancing of OER textbooks.

In this scenario, the public funding of OER textbooks is usage-based through the remuneration of OER textbooks that have successfully passed textbook approval and are actually used in school settings. The amount of compensation is determined on the basis of surveys and sample surveys of OER textbooks in the classroom.

  1. Development of OER textbook ‘blanks’.

Instead of investing in ready-made OER textbooks, funding could also be provided for the creation of ‘blanks’ that can easily be adapted to the requirements in different federal states. What the blanks have in common are only minimum content requirements from the Ministry of Education, which are controlled for quality assurance. From then on, they can be individually supplemented by educational media providers with additional multimedia offerings, without them having to worry about open licensing of the basic content.

  1. Introduction of an OER clause in the approval process.

In this scenario, providers would have to contractually commit through an OER clause in the textbook approval process by the state of NRW to make the textbooks available as OER after a defined phase of commercial distribution. The phase could be defined either temporally (e.g., after five years) or factually (e.g., when a certain number have been sold). Thus, after a short period of time, there could be OER textbooks for a wide variety of subjects in NRW.

The various financing models can be read in more detail here with recommendations from the authors.

What has happened since then and what’s next?

In 2020, the Ministry of Culture and Science, together with the Digital University NRW (DH.NRW), funded 18 concepts for digital teaching and learning formats with a total of 10.5 million euros in the “OERContent.nrw” (Open Education Resources) funding line as a result of the Corona pandemic, in order to expand the e-learning offerings of universities. The teaching and learning content was posted on the new online state portal ORCA.nrw (Open Resources Campus NRW) and is available to all students and teachers in NRW.

OERContent.nrw is the largest nationwide funding line for open educational resources. The funding line is intended to make the benefits of freely accessible teaching and learning offerings recognizable and tangible for teachers and students. But more offerings and funding initiatives are needed. The task of education policy is to adapt existing funding models to enable the professional creation of OER textbooks and learning materials.

Quellen:

http://www.fgw-nrw.de/fileadmin/user_upload/NOED-Studie-06-Dobusch-A1-komplett-Web.pdf

https://www.dh.nrw/kooperationen/OER-Content.nrw-42

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Situation and development of school clouds in Germany

The corona-induced homeschooling or distance learning has put learning with digital media in the focus of public discussion and made clear differences in the use of school clouds in Germany visible. The Institute for Information Management at the University of Bremen (ifib) was therefore commissioned by the Telekom Foundation to conduct a systemic inventory of school learning platforms and IT strategies in all German states and five German municipalities. The recently published study addresses the questions:

  • What is in the various learning platforms that the federal states and also some municipalities offer their schools?
  • How are the systems organized technically?
  • Who provides pedagogical and technical support?
  • How much do these solutions differ from one another?

In addition to an overview of the solutions used, the study also provides a model that systematizes all parts of a learning management system (LMS) and shows what opportunities the respective learning platforms offer students, how the operation of the systems is organized, and who provides pedagogical and technical support. Bavaria, Bremen, Hamburg and Saxony showed a broad set-up of digital media for teaching. In other states, however, different solutions exist side by side in some cases.

The study’s final finding:

There will probably not be a nationwide uniform school cloud solution in Germany – and it is not necessary as long as there are common standards and functioning interfaces for all existing learning management systems in the future.

The benefits of LMSs should have been clear at the latest since the school closures, even though Germany was very late in getting involved with learning platforms by international standards. As true all-rounders, school clouds or learning management systems support teaching and learning processes, simplify organizational processes, and provide a technical basis for communication between teachers, learners, parents, and the school through supplementary offerings from external providers (e.g., by means of video conferencing systems or messenger services).

We at OESA e.V. recommend the following, open source-based systems:

  1. Moodle
  2. ILIAS (developed at the University of Cologne)
  3. and StudIP.

All three are hosted on the school’s own server, are therefore DSGVO-compliant, free of charge and free of advertising, and make it possible to control access rights for the various instances through closed user groups. However, setting up learning environments is highly dependent on the IT infrastructure available in each case; both Moodle and Ilias must be set up and hosted as closed systems on their own servers. Those looking for lower-threshold offerings will have to reckon with a loss of functionality. However, in order to establish open source systems, such as Moodle, in the school context in a long-term, sustainable and future-proof manner, much greater investment in the know-how of the institutions and the competencies of the people is required in addition to the provision of material resources for IT equipment. We have compiled further information on LMS and their didactically meaningful use here.


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Do we need alternatives to Padlet?

Recently, Padlet was classified as problematic in terms of data protection by the LDA Brandenburg. The educational server Berlin-Brandenburg now also advises against the use of Padlet. Since then, the use of Padlet has been discontinued at many schools in Germany, which is regretted by many teachers who have increasingly used digital tools for teaching since the beginning of the Corona pandemic and homeschooling and are enthusiastic about the intuitive and playful design as well as the many possibilities Padlet offers.

The problem with the interactive pinboard tool: data protection.

Padlet is not GDPR-compliant. The platform originates from the United States, where the General Data Protection Regulation does not apply. Previously, use of the platform in a school context ran under the “Privacy Shield,” under which U.S. providers had to comply with European data protection regulations. This was overturned and since July 2020, no personal data may be transferred to the United States. However, Padlet shares data with third-party providers, such as Google, when it is used. The exact data content is largely unknown, but Padlet can store and process personal data such as shared content, IP addresses or movement profiles by the company or third-party providers. Thus, the risk outweighs the benefit for data protectionists.

But there is also a way to use Padlet without data protection problems. Padlet can also be used without an account. Instead of registering, you can also log in via a guest account to avoid creating your own profile. Students can also access Padlet through a link provided by their teachers. If Padlet is used at school on school devices without the students logging in to other services, their usage behavior remains anonymous as long as no personal data is entered into Padlet. If Padlet is used with a school end device via a private Internet connection, it is not clear what data is collected by the platform operator. However, as soon as the platform is used via private end devices, the provider can store personalized data that can be used to identify the user.

Padlet can therefore only be used on school devices without hesitation. However, if you want or have to avoid using Padlet, you can take a look at the following alternatives or browse through our Toolbox yourself:

1. Pinnit is a data-saving digital pinboard that has many features that Padlet also offers. Collaborative work can be done here and, for example, posts or ideas can be collected. In addition, published contributions can be commented and rated. Only the most necessary data is stored on a German server during use. Furthermore, no personalizing registration is necessary for use and IP addresses are pseudonymized.

2. Taskcards is a German alternative to Padlet. The platform is also DSGVO-compliant and its servers are located exclusively in Germany. Registration is also possible via a guest account. The design and the user interface are very similar to the American model. Many features that are available on Padlet are also offered by Taskcards. Private pinboards can be created here, which can also be published if required. It works with texts, images, links and various file attachments.

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Open education in schools- a case study from Germany

There are now various measures to bring schools into the digital age: We have the Digital Pact, and there are also a number of projects and associations. It makes you wonder why digitization in schools has been so slow to get off the ground.

But at least one school in Germany is getting the hang of it. Using the Realschule am Europakanal in Erlangen as an example, educational scientist Celestine Kleinesper explains how openness and digitization can be put to good use. In this case, this includes not only teaching how to use hardware and software, but also which teaching/learning contexts certain tools and formats are suitable for. Uniformity, capacity, and the willingness of school management, teachers, parents, and students are essential.

The presentation:

Although this example exists in practice, many schools are not (yet) so fit in terms of digitization. In the discussion after the input, a number of theories emerge as to which aspects have an inhibiting effect. One recurring finding: the cultural sovereignty of the states in Germany, i.e., the fact that each state. Among the participants in the discussion group, 4 federal states shared their experiences. It also became clear that digitization is often confused with mechanization; equipping every school with smartboards and tablets therefore only makes sense if the relevant skills are imparted to those involved.