This year I decided to attend the OLC (Online Learning Consortium) Innovate conference in New Orleans. The conference was a great experience in part for getting to hear from others in the same field on what their doing to improve online learning and I also had the opportunity to immerse myself in the culture, music, and food of New Orleans; the chance ended up being very fulfilling.

Of the sessions I attended, two in particular really stuck with me. One session, as the title “Don’t Put Your Phone Away” suggests, demonstrated how instructors can incorporate students’ phones into their classrooms. One tool in particular that really intrigued me was Kahoot!. Kahoot! is free tool that allows you to create fun learning games made up of multiple choice questions. You can add images, videos, and diagrams to your questions to enhance them. Kahoot!s are meant for an in-class setting as they are not embeddable in web content. You’ll also want to make sure you are using a classroom that has a projector, as the answer choices will only appear on the screen with a corresponding symbol. This symbol is what students see on their devices. Once they see these symbols, they must select the symbol that corresponds with the answer they want to select.

However, students must be in the classroom in order to participate. This can be particularly helpful as you could use Kahoot! as a way to take attendance. Because Timmy can’t login from home and pretend that he is in the classroom, it makes attendance reliable. Kahoot! allows you to randomize question and answers, in the way most LMS systems do as well. Furthermore, you can also set up a time limit for how long you want the answers to appear on the screen.

While the actual look of Kahoot! does appear to be more geared for K-12, the room where the session was held was filled adults getting competitive and having a blast; so do not let its look and feel scare you away. And like I said earlier, this tool is great for taking attendance or you can pop up a Kahoot! after a lecture to gauge how much of what you said actually stuck with your students. This tool is also a great way to introduce a new topic to students and get students excited about what they are going to be learning for the day. All in all I highly recommend instructors take a look at this tool and see how it might fit in your classroom.

The other session that I went to was about a Merlot award winning course from University of Queensland. The course, “Crime 101: The Psychology of Criminal Justice”, took technology to a whole new level by filming an 8 episode crime drama that students had to watch weekly. The drama started with the crime taking place and ended with the verdict. The main purpose of the course was to explore the psychology of law and the misconceptions that people have about criminal justice. All the episodes are on YouTube, and are available for others to use in their course if they would like. Additionally, the course is available as free self-paced course at edX. The amount of detail that was put into this course was astounding and I left wishing I had a course like this at the college that I went to.

Overall, OLC Innovate was a really well organized conference with a variety of sessions to choose from. Not to mention, being in New Orleans definitely didn’t hurt. If you are looking for a new conference to attend, I definitely recommend giving this one a chance