Reflection Blog Post #5

Today, I'm going to talk about Trello and it's capabilities as a communication tool. Matt actually shared Trello with me on one of my other posts, needless to say I checked it out and I liked it. I have not actually used it in the classroom, but Brian, Chad, and I created a board earlier and sharing images and information was quick and easy.

So here is what Trello does:

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• Provides boards for organizing information, kind of similar to Pinterest
• Can act as a to-do list for tasks for a group
• Allows users to share information, images, links, etc. with other team members
• Boards can be organized into groups, color-coded, and labeled
• One cool feature that I liked was the ability to add a checklist on a board.                                                

So, it really is kind of like Pinterest for putting tasks into action. I would have used this for my leadership class this past year if I had known about it. Our leadership class was an extension of student council and the class was in charge of all of the student body activities. All of these activities were executed by committees and the biggest problem we ran into was communication. This tool would have allowed students to create tasks, see when they were completed, and add to the list so that all students can see the updates. It could have also been a tool for quick assessment as we could have seen who did what to ensure that all students were active in the planning and execution of the activity. This could be used for any collaborative work where students need to track their progress and monitor their group's work.

As far as SAMR, I don't think this completely redefines classroom learning. I do think it can serve as substitution, augmentation, and modification. It provides a new and improved forum for collaborative projects and it changes the way that students can interact. This program is easy to use and I think I would use it for a more complex group project