Page 7 - THE Journal, October/November 2018

FEATURE | Best of Ed Tech
ICE AWARDS
BY DAVID NAGEL
FOR OUR FOURTH-ANNUAL Readers’ Choice Awards, more than 1,000 education technology professionals weighed in on their favorite technologies, from instructional technology to security and privacy tools, from mobile devices to projectors, from games to multimedia authoring tools
In all, 1,109 classroom teachers, IT leaders and staff, administrators, instructional technologists, library and media professionals and other school and district staff voted for their favorite brands and products.
Top Overall Technologies
Lexia toppled the winners from the previous two Readers’ Choice Awards, beating out Google and Apple for the top spot (Platinum award). Lexia Core5 was cited as the favorite both in the overall voting (in an open-ended question, no less) and in individual product categories, below.
Google came in second this year (Gold Award), with educators citing both G Suite for Education (including the highly popular Google Classroom) and Google Chromebooks as their favorites.
Last year’s second place winner, Apple, hung on to third place (Silver Award) this year with its iPad and MacBook.
Platinum: Lexia Core5
Gold: Google (G Suite, Chromebooks) Silver: Apple (iPad, MacBook)
Top Technologies Adopted in the Last 12 Months
We also asked educators to name their favorite technologies adopted by their schools in the last year. Lexia Learning also took first place here (Platinum), as it did in last year’s poll. Readers cited its power for personalized and adaptive learning, its ability to help struggling students, its support for ELL students, its teacher resources and its reporting tools.
Google took second place in this category for the second year running, again for a com- bination of Chromebooks and G Suite for Education. Educators said Chromebooks allow more students (and in many cases all students) to access technology every day for important learning activities.
Discovery Education cracked the top 3 for the first time this year, earning a silver award, primarily for its Techbook, but also for its streaming service and professional development resources. Educators cited the valuable resources Discovery’s Techbook brings to STEM education (and non-STEM subjects), as well as standards alignment and support for dif- ferentiation.
Platinum: Lexia Core5
Gold: Google software and hardware
Silver: Discovery Education Techbook, Streaming Plus, Discovery
Educator Network
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