One Tool to Rule Them All

I was in search for a multi-tool, a Swiss Army Knife. A tool that had it all, one-stop shopping. Why? Because I was operating under the assumption that parents/learners needed, demanded it. But wasn’t my assumption based on just a few loud squeaky wheels? In life outside the classroom we have various tools for various jobs, various recipes for various occasions, even various forms of exercise depending on need/want.

I remember some years back students coming to me fresh at the beginning of the year and all they wanted to do was slideshows, they’d ask, “Can we do a Google Slide? The danger of “One Story”. The danger of one platform. We talk of personalization and differentiation and then we give them standardization, TPT, Slidesmania, Seesaw, Google Classroom, Bitmoji classrooms, etc. where all the illustrations and fonts seem vaguely similar. I love Google Classroom, it’s my USPS, my logistics— delivers and receives.  Seesaw is great for parent communication and blogging. OneNote Class Notebooks almost has it all, especially with Immersive Reader but I still need Google Sites, Flipgrid, WeVideo, Adobe Spark.

This summer we were shopping for a chair for my wife who had developed severe back pain during Emergency Remote Teaching in the Spring of 2020. Ended up we got the one that had the most ways to individually adjust it for her comfort, no one size fits all. We don’t all shop at Walmart, we don’t all buy Crest. Variety is the spice of life they say.

This is one thing I like about Eduprotocols they give me the foundation and frame but then it is up to my learners and I to actually build the house. And no we will not use just a screwdriver.

Of course, it would be easier for me to just use one tool like Seesaw for everything, but is that the goal? And wouldn’t you get tired of having oatmeal as your staple every day? Here are oatmeal and meatballs, oatmeal parmigiana, oatmeal sous vide. Ridiculous sounding isn’t it.