Second day, focused on benchmarking only

Benchmarking is a word and a practice that comes from business world. Consist on comparing products, services or working processes in order to know which are the best practices for our team. Today’s and tomorrow sessions are focused on some educational apps/services that could be useful for our classrooms. And there is a good reason to focus on apps: education isn’t related to a building, school is not a place, so it’s probably that will not stay non-digital on next 10 years. So that it means that schools will turn into a place to discuss about the learning that happens outside the school. These are the apps:

 

SEPPO

Developed in collaboration with Finnish schools and the University of Helsinki, it’s an that allows teachers transform every place into a learning environment. Specially designed to develop 21st century skills, works through GPS and is very useful to create “gymkanas” or also treasure hunt games for our students. You can assign task in different points in a city or a museum, for example, and players needs to solve them in order to achieve the goal fixed by the teacher. Teacher can follow the game in real time and give feedback to their students immediately. After they showed us how to use it, we participate in a funny workshop in order to test see the app in a student perspective. 

 

3D BEAR

As its name means, with this app you can create 3D figures and also supports augmented reality. So its most remarkable feature consist in putting the 3D creations into familiar places using mobile devices. It could be useful in a STEAM framework, for example, but not really so much. 

 

MIGHTIFIER

Developed in collaboration with Espoo schools, it’s an app designed as complement of Kiva in order to reduce anxiety or bullying in the classroom. They presented us the app as a tool to improve wellness, promote empathy and the emotional education of our students, because a good emotional environment improves results. It’s a both-sides app (teachers-students) that allows to see in real time wellbeing data of our classroom. Gives to teachers a feedback about their interventions with their students and if its being really effective (in order to continue or change the measures adopted). 

 

After that, I decided to expend my free time having a last walk in Helsinki. So I chose to visit the Sibelius park, named in memory of the most famous Finnish composer.