App News: Supporting students’ learning and empowering local communities through technology

This week’s app news is all about education, and how Podio App Builders are creating new tools to aid student’s learning at universities and in their surrounding communities.

Lisbet Pals Svendsen, Copenhagen Business School

Learning log – Lisbet Pals Svendsen of Copenhagen Business School created the Learning log app for her students studying Corporate Communications as part of an International Business bachelors programme.

Lisbet says the Learning log App helps students find the best way for their learning to progress.

“One aim of the app is to encourage the students to fill in a log whenever they feel they have encountered some ‘learning point’, i.e. a point where they learned something new about e.g. procedure, methodology, information seeking or the like, which they may want to reproduce at some later stage; the app furthermore allows students to track their own learning progress in a course where they may not feel they are making progress on a daily basis, but if they go back and read former logs, they could track their own learning process and find out what works for them.”

Tips for using the Learning log App:

• If you’re not already using Podio, sign-up – it’s free
• Create a workspace on Podio and invite your course’s instructors and students in
• Add the app to the space – you can find it in the free Podio App Store
• When students encounter ‘learning points’ they should add them to the Learning log App
• Have discussions around log entries with comments

Get the Learning log App from the free Podio App Store here.

Stephen Woicik, Fordham University RETC

Asset Inventory – Stephen Woicik from Fordham University RETC, New York has created a great package of apps for a scheme designed to empower the local community, by providing them with the use of the university’s technology equipment.

“Currently the Fordham University RETC has between 1,000 and 2,000 technology assets in our inventory,” Stephen says.

“Part of our job is to distribute this technology to various partnering middle and high schools in our area for use by student in the classroom. This app helps us manage what technology we have available, and where any current technology is located (which teacher/school has what).

“The iPhone app is a huge advantage as well. We are able to pull up active inventory while we are in a school. We can see if the school has any technology currently loaned or what we have available to loan them. It has really streamlined and improved our inventory.”

The Asset Inventory Pack features an Inventory App to record all the equipment owned by an educational institution, along with an app called Loan that records when these products have been loaned out to other schools. These apps link to a Teachers App and a Schools App so the insituation that owns the equipment always knows exactly where it is, and when to expect it back.

All of these apps can easily be modified to suit other institutions and programmes. For example, the pack could be used to track the distribution of technology equipment internally within an school or institution.

Get the Asset Inventory App Pack from the free Podio App Store here.

App News is a bulletin to keep you up to date with the best new apps in the App Store, and to give a few hints about how to get the most out of them. If you’d like to contact the builders of these apps, simply comment on the app in the App Store and they can reply to you there. For tips and tricks on building and sharing your own apps, get in touch with Podio (you can find my e-mail address in the ‘About the author’ section below) – we’re more than happy to help.