FTT - Conceptboard

Logo From Conceptboard.com

 Annotate, Comment, and Collaborate with Conceptboard in Chrome

@joe_edtech

In my very first blog post for Deerfield High School, I introduced a Chrome Add-On called Notable PDF, an App designed to make scanned documents usable inside of Drive. While Notable PDF is still a pretty good tool, saving and sharing annotated PDFs isn't intuitive, and sometimes that serves as a barrier to good collaboration.

I recently started using a different app, called Conceptboard. Conceptboard is also available on the Chrome Web Store and also integrates nicely with Google Drive, however, Conceptboard is both more user friendly and more powerful than Notable PDF. With virtually no training, any user familiar with Drive can open a PDF using Conceptboard, insert comments, and share the "board" with other users.

After you've added the app to Chrome, open any PDF
or Picture file in Conceptboard to get started. 

However, Conceptboard is much more than just a way to annotate and share PDFs. The CEO of the company puts it this way, "Conceptboard is about visualization and task management: We've made it easier to communicate your ideas graphically and to get more precise feedback. Or the other way around: We enable you to create tasks more precisely, so your ideas are realized exactly as you imagined them!" This is their official video on getting started with Conceptboard:

While I have genuinely grown to like using this tool, I have to admit that I have an ulterior motive for selecting this as our Free Tech Tool this week. I didn't find Conceptboard. Our DHS Students did. Specifically, students in an English class who were working with PDFs that they needed to annotate. They went exploring, tried a few things, and ultimately landed on Conceptboard as a great place to work - with a lot of potential that we haven't even considered at this point.

The lesson is that we don't need to have all of the answers when it comes to technology. No teacher has the time necessary to fully explore all of the apps that are available for Chromebooks or iPads, but some students absolutely thrive on the opportunity to build...or find, as the case may be...a better mouse trap. It might be just the hook some of our students need to really engage with our assignments. When it comes to teaching in a 1:1 classroom, it is perfectly acceptable for us to learn from our students, too.

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Have your students introduced any good apps or tech tools to your classroom? If so, please tell us about the best ones below.