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This tool can be used to estimate the amount of reading and writing you assign for your course.

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Workload Estimator 2.0 - Center for the Advancement of Teaching

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The Center for the Advancement of Teaching aims to advance passionate, reflective, and evidence-informed teaching. We contribute to Wake Forest's distinctive mission by encouraging the development of teacher-student relationships that prepare all students to live examined, purposeful lives. Learn More >>

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Here are the Top 100 Tools for learning generated from the 17th Annual Tools for Learning survey. There were a total of 2,022 votes and this year there were more votes from the education sector than last year, which is why many of the educational tools have regained lost ground on this year's list. New tools on the list are shaded yellow in the table below, and tools returning to the list are shaded green. The big news for this year is that ChatGPT has jumped straight into the chart in the No 4 place. 2023 is the year that AI has finally taken off. For a categorisation of the tools (both as a list and in graphical format), take a look at By Category

To work through the list tool by tool, start with YouTube and follow the link at the top right of each page.

Total Page Visits: 921732 - Today Page Visits: 295

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Top 100 Tools for Learning 2023 – Results of the 17th Annual Survey published 4 September 2023

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Here are the Top 100 Tools for learning generated from the 17th Annual Tools for Learning survey. There were a total of 2,022 votes and this year there were more votes from the education sector than last year, which is why many of the educational tools have regained lost ground on this year’s list. New tools on the list are shaded yellow in the table below, and tools returning to the list are shaded green. The big news for this year is that ChatGPT has jumped straight into the chart in the No 4 place. 2023 is the year that AI has finally taken off. For a categorisation of the tools (both as a list and in graphical format), take a look at By Category

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Virtual 3D spaces

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Engagement - Reimagined

Empower your people to collaborate, communicate, and play

Real-time experiences in custom virtual worlds, accessible to anyone, anywhere.

UNSCHEDULED CONNECTIONS WITH AN IN-PERSON VIBE

No more boring video conferencing. Spatial video chat means you can easily move between conversations and connect with people in your proximity.

Converge purpose and play

A world of interactive context

The information and content that's important to you and your visitors. Embed and integrate applications, games, and tools.

PERSISTENT GATHERING SPACES

EXPERIENCES TO ENGAGE YOUR COMMUNITY

Help your community connect more meaningfully with shared fun, co-created memories, and multi-modal communication.
BOOK A DEMO

MEASURE SUCCESS

VALUABLE INSIGHTS
AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

Run experiments, measure engagement and retention, and evolve your experiences with robust analytics.

Boost school spirit and empower students to connect to each other with interactive social experiences inside a branded virtual campus.

Whether used for learning, tutoring, club meetups, after-school activities, or just a place to socialize - students will be more engaged.

Improve learning outcomes with immersive virtual classrooms and help students connect more naturally with their school community.

Drive enrollment with a digital twin of your campus, embedded interactive content, and real-time admission assistance.
‍

Reduce costs and improve employee retention with social experiences for your employees to collaboratively complete learning journeys and modules.

Multi-modal social learning improves outcomes and makes training something your employees look forward to!
‍

Enhance your community with social spaces that enable new forms of connection, communication, and collaboration.

Enhance webinar outcomes with interactive showcases of products and services and improve conversion with insights into visitor behavior.

Strengthen your player community and build awareness for your titles with social experiences that connect your games in a virtual lobby.

Empower gamers to create interactive trophy rooms, have clan gatherings, and stream their gameplay into community spaces.

Augment productivity with persistent collaboration spaces that help distributed teams come together with scheduled meetings or unscheduled serendipity.

Retain customers with personalized in-world support and boost hiring with recruiting events.

Born from a tech-savvy generation's journey from mainframes to dynamic digital realms, artists, creators, and confluencers are converging to create experiences for genuine connection.

In this fast-paced digital frontier, late adoption can leave you trailing behind. Immerse yourself in trans-formative social experiences setting the stage for the evolving on-line narrative. Be more than a spectator; become a leader in this wave of innovation.

UNLEASH YOUR IMAGINATION

Stride partnered with Topia to launch K12 Zone - a white-labeled interactive virtual campus that turns online school into an open-world experience that is innovative, engaging, and safe.

No limit to the number of people! Host thousands in each world with no limit on the number of worlds.
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Meet your people where they are. Access Topia from anywhere with an internet connection - no special hardware required

Visual interface with out-of-the box designs and drag-and-drop tools to build and experiment with your 2.5D world.

Robust moderation and safety tools combined with patented Peer-to-Peer (P2P) encrypted audio/video connections.

Spatial Audio & Video

Broadcast and Screensharing

Presentation Mode

Session Recording

Text Chat, DMs, and Group Messaging

Embed any Game, Tool, Application, or Website

Moderation Tools

Analytics Dashboard

Events System for Scheduling

Controlled World Access & Gating (including SSO)

Admin Permissions

Dedicated and Persistent URLs

Alerts and Browser Push Notifications

Video Blur and Filters

Emotes and Unlockable Content

Drag & Drop Builder Mode

3D Compatible*

Create an embodiment of your AI inside a world for users to interact with.
Use GenAI to design your world. Integrate with AI for content moderation and analytics.

1. Own your database to eliminate 3rd party risk

2. Host the platform on your domain

3. Integrate with your SSO for seamless account

4. Create an unlimited number of worlds

5. Custom styling and branding

6. FERPA, LTI, WCAG Compliant

7. Integrate with Slack or MS Teams for moderation

8. Ecosystem-wide analytics dashboard

9. Custom settings, feature availability, and UI

10. Proprietary scenes, designs, and applications

11. Custom avatars and emotes

Own your database to eliminate 3rd party risk

Host the platform on your domain

Integrate with your SSO for seamless account integration

Create an unlimited number of worlds

Custom styling and branding

FERPA, LTI, WCAG Compliant

Integrate with Slack or MS Teams for moderation

Ecosystem-wide analytics dashboard

Custom settings, feature availability, and UI controls

Proprietary scenes, designs, and applications

Custom avatars and emotes

Create custom applications and extensions via the real-time SDK, API, and webhooks
LEARN MORE

Discover the endless possibilities that await

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Topia - Real-Time Interactive Spatial Communication Engine

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Build, deploy, and customize real-time social experiences inside accessible virtual worlds. Bring people together to work, learn, and collaborate. Free to start

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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This is a standard for many licensed teachers. Part of cognitive load begins with comfort levels in reading.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39931.I_Read_It_but_I_Don_t_Get_It

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Cognitive Load Theory and Its Application in the Classroom

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Cognitive Load Theory and Its Application in the Classroom

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Cognitive Load Theory (Cognitive Load Theory - the idea that working memory is limi... ) has recently become 'The Next Big Thing' in teaching. Dylan Wiliam tweeted on 26 January 2017 that he had 'come to the conclusion Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory Abbreviated to CLT, the idea that working memory is limited ... is the single most important thing for teachers to know.' This is an emphatic statement and it is important to consider the implications. As teachers, there are huge demands on our time, so when considering a new strategy it is essential to evaluate the evidence.

CLT, first researched by Sweller (Sweller, 1998) towards in the late 1980s, is based around the idea that our working memory - the part of our mind that processes what we are currently doing - can only deal with a limited amount of information at one time. Reif's (Reif, 2010) description of cognitive load is extremely useful: 'The cognitive load involved in a task is the cognitive effort (or amount of information processing) required by a person to perform this task.' There are a number of excellent resources freely available online that explain CLT (see Paas et al. (Paas et al., 2003) for a useful overview), so we will only touch on the foundations of the theory here that will be useful for the rest of the article.

The theory identifies three different forms of cognitive load:

Intrinsic cognitive load: the inherent difficulty of the material itself, which can be influenced by prior knowledge of the topic

Extraneous cognitive load: the load generated by the way the material is presented and which does not aid learning

Germane cognitive load: the elements that aid information processing and contribute to the development of 'schemas'.

CLT suggests that if the cognitive load exceeds our processing capacity, we will struggle to complete the activity successfully. In summarising CLT, De Jong (De Jong, 2010) states that 'cognitive load theory asserts that learning is hampered when working memory capacity is exceeded in a learning task'.

Working memory should be seen as short term and finite, whereas long-term memory can be seen as infinite. The aim should be to move knowledge to long-term memory because when a student is exposed to new material, they can draw on this previous knowledge and the cognitive load is reduced. However, if subject knowledge is incomplete, the student is unable to fall back on the long-term memory and the working memory becomes overloaded, leading to working memory failures. According to Gathercole and Alloway (Gathercole and Alloway, 2007), indications of working memory failures include:

incomplete recall

failing to follow instructions

place-keeping errors

task abandonment.

Of course, there are many other reasons for these that are not related to CLT; however, if teachers understand how this theory applies to their classroom, they can plan their lessons in a way that takes into account cognitive load.

Reducing cognitive load

Intrinsic cognitive load can be reduced by breaking down the subject content, sequencing the delivery so that sub-tasks are taught individually before being explained together as a whole. The idea is to not overwhelm a student too early on in the introduction of new work.

Extraneous cognitive load can be reduced by the way in which instructions are presented. We make sense of new material by referencing schema or mental models of pre-existing knowledge. Lack of clarity in instruction puts too high a load on the working memory, and so too much time is spent problem-solving the instructions as opposed to new schema formation. For example, lessons that use PowerPoint with excessive writing and the teacher talking at the same time, can inadvertently generate excessive cognitive load and lead to working memory failures. Chandler and Sweller (Chandler and Sweller, 1991) write that 'Cognitive Load Theory suggests that effective instructional material facilitates learning by directing cognitive resources towards activities that are relevant to learning.'

Van Merriënboer et al. (Van Merriënboer et al., 2003) recommend using simple-to-complex sequencing to try to reduce cognitive load. They advise starting with worked-out examples (where a full solution is shown, which students then have to apply to a new question), then moving into completion assignments (where a partial solution is given and they have to complete it themselves), and then moving to conventional tasks, where they are simply given the question. This acts as a form of scaffolding Progressively introducing students to new concepts to suppor... , which helps students to learn independently, without necessarily needing the help of their teacher for each stage.

Renkl and Atkinson (Renkl and Atkinson, 2003)further investigated this fading form of scaffolding. They suggestedthat moving through activities sequentially could reduce intrinsic load, as learners will have already mastered some of the knowledge they need to work out a solution in an earlier skill stage. Therefore, their research recommends beginning with a model (a complete example), gradually removing completed steps, which the learner will have to complete independently, and finally leaving just the to-be-solved problem.

These principles can be readily applied in the classroom by beginning with a model answer, then providing a writing frame/structure with a lot of information, followed by a writing frame/structure with less information, then finally a question that learners must complete independently without a writing frame. It is worth, though, being aware of the 'expertise reversal effect' suggested by Kalyuga et al. (Kalyuga et al., 2003), whereby if you continue to provide worked-out examples for experts, their usefulness is significantly reduced. Cognitive load theorists suggest this is because worked-out examples contain information that an expert could work out for themselves, making it redundant and therefore extraneous cognitive load rather than useful germane cognitive load.

Presenting information to minimise cognitive load

Chandler and Sweller (Chandler and Sweller, 1992) found evidence of the split-attention effect. This occurs when different sources of information discussing the same topic are separated by time or space, such as a diagram with a key that corresponds to separate text next to it. When information is presented in this way, it is left to the learner to attempt to amalgamate it, which generates extraneous cognitive load. Therefore, it is recommended that if one of the sources adds nothing new, it should be eliminated. However, if it is essential to include both sources, they should ideally be physically integrated (e.g. texts and diagrams combined). This way, extraneous cognitive load is reduced and working memory capacity can be used for intrinsic and germane cognitive load instead.

A word of caution

There are, of course, issues with CLT. Reif (Reif, 2010) writes that if cognitive load is reduced too much, 'the entire learning process would consist of too many small steps - and would thus become unduly fragmented and long'. There are also issues to do with the hypothesis being unfalsifiable. Doug Holton (Holton, 2009) points out that it is difficult to measure cognitive load, and therefore difficult to generate evidence to prove the theory.

An important question, though, is whether it is useful in the classroom. Ashman (Ashman, 2017) has explained that an understanding of CLT changed his maths teaching, and offers the following four examples:

1. I don't read out my slides - avoid simultaneous oral and text presentation

2. Break it down, further - pause for practice between individual problem types (this leads directly into number 3)

3. Example-problem pairs - give a worked example alongside an almost identical question

4. Stop after five minutes - advise students never to spend more than five minutes trying to solve a homework problem

So is CLT the single most important thing for a teacher to know? Perhaps not - it is a bold claim. But, if used correctly, it can improve teacher instruction, which is an important variable in the complex classroom environment.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Break down subject content when introducing new topics and pause regularly to check understanding.

Present instructions clearly without using too many sources of information at the same time.

Be wary of reducing cognitive load too much - the learning process should be manageable, but not overly fragmented.

Dominic Shibli is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Hertfordshire. Prior to that he was Head of Science and SLE for the North Herts Teaching Alliance.

Rachel West has a BSc in psychology and has been teaching psychology for three years. She is interested in raising awareness of the ways in which psychological theory can be applied to teaching practice.

References

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Cognitive Load Theory and its application in the classroom

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Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has recently become 'The Next Big Thing' in teaching. Dylan Wiliam tweeted on 26 January 2017 that he had 'come to the conclusion Sweller's Cognitive Load Theory is the single most important thing for teachers to know.' This is an emphatic statement and it is important to consider the implications.

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The widespread use of computers and the Internet is now commonplace in higher education. College students routinely use computers to complete assignments, conduct research on the Web, and take part in online activities. Although these technologies help students become more productive, concerns exist as to whether the use of these technologies are creating additional barriers for students with disabilities.

The University of Hawaii, in accord with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 is committed to ensuring that campus computing and information resources are accessible to disabled students, faculty and staff. Ongoing efforts are a collaboration between Disabled Student Services (), the Office of Equal Employment Opportunities ( EEO) and Affirmative Action, UH Libraries, and Information Technology Services. These efforts include making departmental web sites and online instruction more accessible and also providing assistive technologies in the computer labs on campus.

What is Assistive Technology?

A general term used to describe technology that assists people with disabilities such as screen reading software or alternate keyboards is "assistive technology". The Assistive Technology Act (ATA) of 1998 defines assistive technology as "any item, piece of equipment, or product system, whether acquired commercially, modified, or customized, that is used to increase, maintain, or improve the functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities."

What is Accessibility to Electronic Information?

The term accessibility is used to describe whether a user with a disability is able to input information into a computer and retrieve and use the output effectively. Accessibility can involve the use of a modified keyboard or mouse, an adjustable desk, screen readers, screen enlargers, or speech recognition software. Accessibility also extends to the World Wide Web. Examples of accessible Web sites are those that allow users who rely on screen readers to navigate and interact with Web pages effectively, or provide alternate formats for audio or video files such as transcripts or captioning.

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The widespread use of computers and the Internet is now commonplace in higher education. College students routinely use computers to complete assignments, conduct research on the Web, and take part in online activities. Although these technologies help students become more productive, concerns exist as to whether the use of these technologies are creating additional barriers for students with disabilities.

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Accessibility guidelines

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The goal of assessment at UH West Oʻahu is to improve student learning and program quality through an iterative process of planning, evidence, analysis, reevaluation and communication.

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The goal of assessment at UH West Oʻahu is to improve student learning and program quality through an iterative process of planning, evidence, analysis, reevaluation and communication.

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.

Reenvisioning the UDL Guidelines

Because the UDL Guidelines are meant to be informed by feedback from the field as well as new research, they have been updated several times in the past. We are in the process of updating the Guidelines once again in our UDL Rising to Equity initiative.

This update will focus specifically on addressing systemic barriers that result in inequitable learning opportunities and outcomes. CAST aims to develop a transparent, inclusive, and community-driven process. If you are interested in collaborating and staying updated on our progress, we invite you to complete a brief survey.

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The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn. Learn more about the Universal Design for Learning framework from CAST. The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment. These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.