This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 35 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode, I'm going to talk about six Ed Tech Tools you should try in 2016.

Over a year ago, I created something I'm really proud of.

Originally, it was just going to be a list, a nice long list of all the tech tools I knew sorted into categories

because it seemed that every time I had a conversation with someone and I mentioned some sort of a tool or something like that, I would get this blank stare from them.

And I thought, I have a blog now. I'm going to create this resource that people can refer to so that they don't have to pretend to know something

and they don't have to ask questions that make them feel stupid or whatever.

So just give them a resource. It's going to be a list of tools. They were going to be broken into categories.

So for example, I would have PowerPoint and Prezi and Google Slides all in the same category of presentation tools.

And I would have, you know, Kahoot and Pull everything together in a category called Assessment Tools.

And I would have it all broken down like that and it was just going to be a list.

And then I thought, well, I should at least have every item in the list linked to the website where that tool is.

So it will be a nice interactive list where people can jump right over and check it out.

And then I thought, well, I should describe each one. And maybe I could also just include a little screenshot of it so they can kind of get an idea of what it looks like when it's in action.

And also, what if I went ahead and added a link to a video that demonstrated the tool in action?

So the list became a book. It became a 210 page PDF and I called it the Teachers Guide to Tech.

I added a glossary of over 80 tech terms. I added a clickable table of contents so that people could jump around from section to section real easily.

And I also did the same thing with the index. It took hours to put it together. I shouldn't even say hours. It took weeks and months to put it together.

But I really feel like the finished product was just incredible.

So now it's 2016 and I have updated it because, as you know, with technology, things get outdated pretty quickly.

And I've decided that as long as I can stand it, I'm going to update it once a year and fix all the broken links and add new tools that have come along and maybe get rid of some that have kind of faded away.

And so for this year, I've added over 30 new tools. I just feel like it's better than ever. It's got new assessment tools.

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