Technology for Teaching and Learning 2

MODULE 3
USING OPEN-ENDED TOOLS IN FACILITATING
LEARNING
Learning Objectives:
At the end of the module, the students should be able to:
1. plan for lessons that can be best presented using open-ended tools or productivity software
applications;
2. explore for available open-ended tools for teaching and learning;
3. search for tools for open ended tools, and
4. demonstrate how these open-ended tools for productivity software applications can be maximized
for teaching and learning.

Introduction

The existence of open-ended tools and/ or productivity tools for teaching and learning is very
helpful to aid teachers in today’s 21st Century classrooms. The demands of the century are very challenging
because they pose a lot of complex work requirements for teachers and multifaceted tasks for learners.
Gone were the days when a student can just focus on doing his/ her schoolwork without any other
engagements and gone were the days when teachers may just focus on delivering his or her lessons aided
by traditional technologies.
Today’s classroom requires integrating instructional technologies to aid the teacher in facilitating
the attainment of the learning outcomes that are meant for the students to demonstrate. Appropriate
engagement of these technologies as tools for learning helps create a rewarding environment because
students get the most from the instructional activities. An essential element in engaging open-ended tools
is when it directly helps in attaining the intended knowledge, skills and attitudes set for the students to
acquire. When the tools are appropriately used, they can fully make learning motivating, encouraging and
meaningful.
Open-ended tools may come in varied forms. There are tools that are very common or conventional
and are installed but there are also tools that are new, innovative and web-based. Regardless of whether the
tool is common or new, installed or web-based, what is important is its contribution to make learning
encouraging, enhancing, and managing in teaching and learning.

Lesson 1: Productivity Software Applications for Teaching and Learning

Open-ended Tools and Their Uses in Teaching and Learning

Open-ended tools or productivity software applications are ICT tools, which help the teachers and
learners make their learning together as concrete, efficient, encouraging and meaningful as possible. In any
teaching-learning process, the use of these tools plays a vital ro9le as it helps meet the demands of the
learners in the 21st Century classrooms. As described by Palmer (2015), teachers need to demonstrate 21st
Century characteristics to be able to meet the demands of the 21st Century learners. Below is a list of what
teachers should do to respond to the demands of the 21st Century.
1. Create a learner centered classroom and make instruction personalized because learners have
different personalities, goals and needs.;
2. Facilitate learners’ productivity skills by helping students produce creative blogs, digital stories
and movies that are helpful to enhance their proficiency.
3. Learn new technologies since technology keeps on developing. Learning a tool once is not an
option for teachers.
4. Go global to allow students to learn skills virtually.
5. Be smart and allow the use of devices as aids to concept and skill acquisition.
6. Do blogging to give students real experience to see the value of writing for real audience and
establishing their digital presence.
7. Go digital to promote the advocacy and to help level up the learning experience of the students
through digital discussion.

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8. Collaborate with other educators and students. This will allow the sharing of great ideas beyond a
conversation and paper copy.
9. Use web chats to share research and ideas and stay updated in the field.
10. Connect with the like-minded individual by using media tools like the social media.
11. Introduce Project Based Learning to allow students to develop their own driving questions, conduct
research, contact experts, and create their projects for sharing with the use of devices present.
12. Build positive digital footprint that aims to model appropriate use of social media, produce and
publish valuable content and create shareable resources.
13. Code as it is today’s literacy. This will boost students’ writing skills as the feeling of writing a page
in HTML is amazing.
14. Innovate to expand your teaching toolbox for the sake of your students, engage social media for
discussions and announcements and use new formats like TED talks in presenting your lessons.
15. Keep learning.

To come up with an ICT-engaged classroom and teacher, it is appropriate to discuss how the various
productivity software applications can be used in the classroom.

A. Using Word in Scaffolding Student Learning in a Classroom

To appreciate the value of Word Applications in scaffolding student learning, it is
necessary to explore how these are maximized by teachers. In education, scaffolding is used to refer
to various forms of support given to assist, guide, or facilitate the learning process (World Links,
2008). Examples of scaffolding for learning that are usually prepared using word applications are
learning plans, assessment tools, templates and forms, graphic organizers and others.

A1. Creating Learning Plans Using Word Applications

With the ubiquity of word-processing software applications and the ability of students to
quickly use them, it is not difficult to encode and package learning plans. This activity will help you plan,
organize, share, implement and enhance your own learning plans in teaching your course.
Step 1: Testing Your Knowledge of Word Processing Software Applications
Begin this activity by citing the existing word processing software applications familiar to the
students.
Step 2: Viewing the Essential Parts of Learning Plans
Although there are varied formats and contents of learning plans across schools in the world,
learning plans have essential parts that are non-negotiable which must be considered by any teacher.
Learning plans can be good for a semester like the syllabus in the tertiary education. It can be a unit plan,
a daily lesson plan or an individualized plan. To better appreciate the way word processing software features
are used to prepare learning plans, some examples of these will be viewed, analyzed and explored.
1. Intel Teach Unit Plan
The Intel Teach Program has this template for its Unit Plan (Intel Corporation, 2007)
2. Department of Education (DepEd)
The Department of Education of the Philippines requires teachers to develop and submit
their lesson plans. With the help of Word Application, the teachers are assisted to develop them
with ease and with the provision to edit and update them.
3. Syllabus
Teaching in the university requires learning plans such as a course syllabus template that
will certainly require encoding and formatting using word application.
Step 3: Sharing the Features of Word Applications for Scaffolding Student Learning
By analyzing special features of Word Applications used in the samples of learning plans, answer
the following discussion questions:
1. What are the advantages of developing learning plans using a word processing software
application?
2. Based on the example, what are the special features of word application software that are beneficial
in organizing the information required in any learning documents?
3. What additional features of word applications do you think are beneficial in preparing your class?

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A2. Preparing Process Guides and Graphic Organizer Using Word Processing Software
Applications
This will allow you explore some process guides that you may implement to help your
future students do their assignments and perform various tasks supported by productivity software
applications tools.
Step 1: The Relevance of Providing Process Guides and Graphic Organizers in Teaching
Discuss the relevance of using process guides and graphic organizers to allow students to become
more efficient and productive in performing their learning tasks. Provide examples on how to guide them
through the process of problem-solving activities or laboratory work.
Step 2: Examples of Process Guides as Scaffold in Teaching and Learning
1. Venn Diagram. To compare and contrast two or more concepts
2. Frayer Model, Bubble Diagram and Concept Map. To describe a concept.
3. T Chart. To make decision.
4. Fishbone Map and Inductive Tower. To show causes and effect.
5. Flow Chart. To show sequence (as in a process).
6. Story Map and 5Ws Chart. To identify basic components.
Step 3: Presentation of the Process Guides or Graphic Organizer.

B. Using Presentation in Teaching

Presentation Software Applications allow learners to:
1. present their reports with audio, visual images and animations;
2. develop and present their group projects using real-world visual presentations;
3. present charts, tables, graphics, charts, and other that are useful to facilitate their understanding
of concepts;
4. show data stored in graphic organizers that cannot be fully presented by a printed material;
5. develop digital investigation reports, digital investigatory reports or digital stories;
6. show results of any survey, questionnaire and other forms of assessment activities.;
7. articulate and crystalize their ideas using the special features of presentation software apps;
8. experience learning processes through the integration of contents in the presentations;
9. enjoy developing their projects; thus, are highly involved;
10. commit to the quality of their work, both content and form, because they don’t only present
what their classmates hear but what they also see:
11. present information in condensed form and focusing on salient points because of the limited
area in slide presentations; hence, avoiding digression and drifting; and,
12. communicate their ideas in an innovative manner and express themselves in ways they feel
comfortable with.

Basic Instructional Design in Preparing Presentations

1. Setting Up the Presentation Class – It is not enough to simply tell students to go and do a
presentation. Students have to be taught the skills involved in giving a presentation. This can
include such things as when to use eye contact, how to organize a presentation, how to connect
with an audience, how to use body language and manage time and how to construct an effective
PowerPoint presentation. Since oral presentations involve multiple communication and language
skills, it is important to focus on the specific presentation skills that are needed to present in front
of others. These included things like voice projection, eye contact and use of gestures.
2. Organization of the Presentation – Proper organization of information is one of the most important
competencies that must be developed amongst students. Hence, before beginning to work on
developing presentation, it is important to understand the genre of oral presentation. There is a need
to learn how to separate the presentation into meaningful sections and presenting each section
separately to reduce the cognitive work that required of in the presentation.
3. Presentation Skills – In developing oral presentations, it is very important to consider to spend time
in the delivery of their outputs. Because English is the medium of instruction in most of the subject
areas, specific language items, such as vocabulary and grammar must be considered to be
successful in oral presentations. These items are important to the students for two reasons. First of
all, they enable students to be successful when they present in the class. Secondly, the language

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and grammar students learn in the course of giving a presentation will be useful for them in other
situations that involve spoken English (Thornbury, 2005).
4. The use of Visual Aids – Visual aids are an important part of oral presentations because they
provide support for both the speakers and the listeners during the presentation. Visual aids can be
used to give more details about the topic, help the audience members to understand what is being
said, and serve as concrete reminder of the message for both the audience and the presenter. The
type of visual aid used can vary depending on the topic of the presentation. Visual aids helped cater
to different learning styles. Some of the students who are not savvy at paper written presentations
are motivated at using presentation software applications.
5. Performing Self-Reflections – The final stage of each oral presentation involves students writing a
self-reflection of their own presentation. Through this activity, writing skills are further enhanced
together with the ability of the students to do self-reflection.

C. Using Spreadsheet in Learning

Spreadsheets are very helpful in introducing some lessons. Through spreadsheets, one can teach
with tables and charts, make a table and a graph, compute students’ grades. Spreadsheet programs are
not only beneficial to business and mathematics courses but are also beneficial to language courses.
Apart from being built around a grid of cells that hold numerical data, spreadsheets also contain text,
dates and other content that can be presented in language courses for discussions.
There are essential ideas that teachers may consider doing when employing spreadsheets in the
classroom.
1. Reinforce learning scientific and mathematical languages in other fields.
2. Add well-designed charts and tables to reports to enhance students’ non verbal reading
skills.
3. Allow students to create their own charts, graphs, tables, and the like, their computational
skills and spatial skills are developed and enhanced.
4. Give students completed chart and see if they can reconstruct underlying worksheet. This
goes a long way toward helping them to understand the relationships between the data and
the charts.
5. Require the science laboratory reports and research papers contain some type of chart to
help support their findings. Encourage them to look for samples from the World Wide Web.
6. Let students explore websites that have table presentation for teaching and let them discuss
how these were used to facilitate the acquisition of competencies.
7. Let the students look for charts in learning materials like textbooks, workbooks and others
and discuss why these were used.
8. Teach the principles of financial literacy and management as it is also important to learn
these concepts in the context of life skills.
9. Explain numerical concepts by showing the relationship between numbers and their
concrete representation in charts and graphs. As teachers, this is needed to understand
researches with quantitative designs.
10. Demonstrate how spreadsheets are useful in preparing assessment and evaluation tools for
students’ performance.

With the advent of web-based word processing software and with the exposure of a lot of students
to new innovative media tools, explore the following online Microsoft Word Alternatives (Investintech,
2020).
1. Drop Box Paper
Dropbox Paper is a free online word processor offered by the online cloud storage provider.
To start using it, you will need a Dropbox account. Once logged in, you get full access to the online
suite. The minimalist interference is very intuitive, and its simplicity allows you to focus on your
content. You can also do a number of things that go beyond creating a textual document. You can
add rich media, such as audio, video and images. Dropbox Paper also allows you to access apps
that let you embed Trello cards, Youtube videos of SlideShare decks. Other collaborative features
include document link-sharing, creating and assigning checklist items to members or embedding
one of your Dropbox documents. Dropbox Paper, overall, does an excellent job at creating dynamic
documents you can share and access online.

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2. Office Online
For Microsoft Word and Office aficionados, the best possible free online alternative for
their document editing needs is definitely Word online, which comes as part of the Office Online
suite. Although free MS Word web app is not a full-fledged version of its paid counterpart, it allows
you to open, create and edit Word documents online. Also, it offers some additional benefits of
online software tools. For example, you are able to see and access updates from co-authors to your
docs literally from anywhere in real time with only an Internet connection and the latest 2016
version. You can share and collaborate on documents. An equally alluring feature of Office Online
is its cross-platform compatibility. So, if you’re a Chromeback or Limux OS user, MS Word web
app is the most elegant way to get access to Microsoft’s document editing features for free.
3. Google Docs
Google Docs allows you to create, collaborate and share documents, spreadsheets,
presentations, drawings and even forms. Google Docs is packed with features, which can be further
extended with various add-ons. While it will automatically save the file online and store it there,
you can also have the documents published as a web page, downloaded, or emailed as an attachment
in Word, ODT, PDF, plain text or RTF formats. You can invite collaborators to work on the
document with you or only allow others to view it without the ability to edit. And if you are
apprehensive of having to depend on the Internet connection for document processing, don’t worry.
You can enable Google Docs offline access and keep editing your documents even when you are
disconnected from Internet. All it takes is a free Google account.
4. Etherpad
Etherpad is an online document editor primarily intended for collaborative editing in, as
the site claims; “really real time”. Its an open source, highly customized tool for online document
collaboration with friends, fellow students and classmates, or colleagues at work. One of its
advantages, especially appealing to users who are reluctant to use services which require email
registration, is that there is no sign up with Etherpad and share the link to it with Etherpad. All you
need to do is start a ne pad and share the link to it with your collaborators. You can also invite them
by email if you prefer. After that, you can start working on the planned writing project together, in
real-time, even if you are miles apart.
5. Zoho
Zoho offers around 20 free online applications including Writer for word processing. You
can link your Zoho account to your Google and Yahoo account, as well. The Writer’s interface
shouldn’t cause anyone problems as it is comfortably familiar. When working online there’s always
the risk losing data due to lost a network connection, accidentally closing your browser or having
your browser crash. Luckily Zoho automatically saves your documents for you, as you finish
typing. Zoho Writer is well-equipped with features that allow you to work easily online: two-way
desktop sync, large file transfer, encryption, file recovery, two-step authentication, in-app chat, and
more. You can import and work with MS Word documents, allowing you to insert images, and edit
content as needed. Zoho Writer offers all the standard text formatting and document creation
features and can export to DOCX, ODF, PDF, Latex, RTF, TXT and even HTML. It can plug into
Echosign for digital signatures, publish the document to a blog or make it public for all to see. Zoho
Docs is completely free to use.
6. OpenOffice
The OpenOffice package actually includes six programs that all use the same engine
making them inherently the same and extremely easy to learn and use. The 6 applications included
in the OpenOffice suite are: Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations),
Draw (graphics) and Base (database manipulation) and Math (mathematical equations). Writer can
even natively do some things that Word cannot, like open PDF files without the addition of a plug-
in or commercial add-on. As the software is an open source, it is maintained by a large community
meaning help and bug fixes are freely available and quickly created. This is perhaps the leading
free desktop alternative to Microsoft Word/ Office. You can install this suite on Windows XP to
Windows 10, macOS (OS X) and Linux.
7. AbiWord
AbiWord is a free word processing application very similar to Microsoft Word. It is
available for Linux distributions only. The software is fully compatible with not only Microsoft
Word, but also OpenOffice.org, Word Perfect, Rich Text Format and more. It has advanced
document layout capabilities and can do mail merge as well, which allows you to automatically fill
in specific form fields in documents with information from databases and comma separated or

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tabbed text files. It is a highly useful feature if you need to work with many formats at the office.
Additionally, the software can be enhanced and expanded with freely available plug-ins that will
give you even more features and functions.
8. Jarte
Jarte is based on Microsoft WordPad Engine, but is still free. There is a paid version of the
software that adds on some extra functionality, but the free version is more than adequate and fully
compatible with Word and WordPad documents. Features include an ergonomic tabbed interface,
small resource requirements, portability, support for touchscreens and quick loading time. It also
has built-in spell checking and can export to HTML and PDF files. Jarte allows you to insert
images, tables, hyperlinks and everything else that you have come to expect from Word.
9. WPS Office 2016 Free
WPS Office 2016 Free is a free document processing suite whose WPS Writer app will
serve you well as a Microsoft Word alternative. WPS Office 2016 Free can open and save to a long
list of popular file formats native to those applications like docs, doc, and more. You can get the
application in languages other than English: French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish and
Russian. The suite has the same familiar look and feel of MS Office with one exception—it has a
tabbed viewing window, so you can open more than one document at a time. And also, worth
mentioning is WPS Cloud, the company’s cloud document storage service that offers up to 1GB of
free storage that you can use. This is perfect if you’re trying to find a free word alternative that’s
not only scalable for teams but can also be as collaborative and seamless as its Microsoft
counterpart.
10. SoftMaker FreeOffice
SoftMaker FreeOffice is another great free suite that offers a full featured Microsoft Word
alternative. The suite’s TextMaker application allows you to focus on creating documents just as
you would in MS Word. This suite offers up essential editing features and even a handful or basic
templates for creating and editing documents. Tables. Charts, shapes, and graphics are available
along with standard text formatting options. This application provides you with everything you
need. The entire suite is available for Windows, Linux and Android, so you can keep your document
processing tasks going even while away from your desktop.