Tech of The Week: Use Learning Apps to Impress

You’ve heard of note-taking. Note-catching is something a little different. And that distinction is at the heart of this post. We’re looking at graphic organizers for high school students, and as part of the Should I Use Tech for This? summer series, we’re asking whether digital graphic organizers or paper serve high school students better, and the answer circles back to the same research that guided our note-taking post way back at the start of the series. We’re also covering the folded paper technique, standard annotation graphic organizers, and the one digital tool, NotebookLM, that does something for note-catching strategies that paper simply cannot replicate.

The best student presentations I’ve seen in my classroom came from a Theory of Knowledge class that turned their exhibitions into Saturday Night Live-style comedy sketches. They couldn’t have done it without technology. And they couldn’t have done it with AI alone either. In this post, part of the Should I Use Tech for This? summer series, I’m sharing what transformative student presentation ideas for high school look like, why creative student presentations go so far beyond the standard slideshow, and the one condition that makes technology work for this task rather than against it.

I once built an elaborate digital vocabulary practice system, complete with drag-and-drop checkboxes and instructional videos, and I was so proud of it that I started selling it. It was a complete waste of everyone’s time. In this post, part of the Should I Use Tech for This? summer series, I’m sharing what that failure taught me about vocabulary practice strategies, why digital vocabulary tools for teachers shine at the surface level and fall flat at the deep and transfer levels, and how Quizlet, Quiz-Quiz-Trade, and a stack of laminated task cards all earned a permanent place in my vocabulary instruction for high school students.