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inextures · 7 months

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Education App Development : Cost, Features and Example

As we step into 2024, the world of learning and teaching is changing big time, all thanks to education app development. This big change is making learning a lot more fun and personal for everyone. Amazingly, according to Statista, we can expect the global education app market to value around USD 124,782.56 million by 2027. Isn’t that incredible?

In this blog post, we will discuss how new tech like smart applications is making this happen. We’ll explore how these tools let students learn in their own unique way, making examples more engaging than ever before. Whether it’s using smart tech to make learning plans just for you or diving into cool virtual worlds to learn, we’re all about to see how learning can be way cooler and more effective. So, let’s get ready to see how these changes are making the future of learning look really promising!

What is an Educational Application?

An educational application is an exceptional sort of application that you can use on your telephone, tablet, or PC to help you learn and study.

Consider it your digital study buddy that has a wide range of stuff for learning, regardless of how old you are or what you want to learn. These applications have cool games, tests, recordings, and even track the amount you’re learning.

You can find apps for just about anything: math, science, languages, and even things for grown-ups to learn for their jobs.

The best part? You can learn happily, go at your own speed, and study at whatever point and any place you need.

Educational apps make learning simpler as well as much more fun, and they’re altering how we ponder going to class or learning new things.

Types of Educational Apps

Educational apps come in many flavors, each designed to cater to different learning needs and stages. Here is a simple breakdown of the kinds of educational apps you could go over:

Language Learning Apps

These are apps specifically made to help you learn new languages. They employ engaging lessons, games, and quizzes to teach anything from fundamental vocabulary to complex grammar. Examples include apps that allow you to practice speaking, listening, and writing in a foreign language.

Examples: Duolingo, Babbel, Rosetta Stone

Classroom Education Apps

These apps resemble having a classroom on your gadget. They are utilized in schools to assist teachers and students in interacting, sharing study materials, and monitoring homework and grades. They make classroom learning more organized and interactive.

Examples: Google Classroom, Edmodo, Kahoot!

Learning Management Apps (LMS)

These apps are a bit like the control center for online learning. Schools, universities, and training programs use them to make and manage courses, select students, and track progress. They’re perfect for both teachers and students to keep everything in one place.

Examples: Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas

Online Courses Apps

Need to learn something new, like photography, coding, or in any event, cooking? Online course apps offer classes on a large number of subjects. You can learn at your own speed with video lessons and assignments from experts.

Examples: Coursera, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning

Exam Preparation Apps

These are your go-to applications while you’re preparing for big exams, like SATs, ACT, or even professional certification tests. They offer practice questions, mock tests, and review tips to help you plan and lift your certainty.

Examples: Quizlet, Khan Academy, BYJU’S

Education Apps for Kids

Designed with colorful interfaces and fun characters, these apps make learning exciting for kids. They cover essentials like reading, writing, math, and science through interactive games and stories, making early learning a joyful experience.

Examples: ABCmouse, Endless Alphabet, Toca Boca apps

What is the Importance of Education App Development?

The creation of educational applications has extended in noticeable quality, essentially modifying the environment of learning and educating.

These applications unite technology and education together, making learning more accessible, engaging, and personalized for students of all ages.

Education apps help students concentrate more and retain information by adjusting content to their learning styles and paces.

They permit students to advance anyplace and whenever removing the geographical and time constraints that traditional educational institutions usually impose.

Education app advancement empowers teachers and institutions to follow progress, organize courses, and give information in additional connections with new ways.

This not only increases the quality of instruction but also prepares students for a future in which digital literacy is important.

Besides, education applications can address an assortment of learning requirements, like language acquisition, professional development, test planning, and youth schooling, making them a significant piece of long-lasting learning.

Benefits of Educational Apps

Educational apps bring a host of benefits that significantly enhance the learning experience for students of all ages. Here are some of the key advantages:

Accessibility: One of the greatest advantages of educational apps is their capacity to make learning materials available to students whenever and in place. This flexibility allows learners to concentrate in a hurry and at their own speed, squeezing education into their way of life consistently.

Individual Learning: Educational apps can adjust to the singular learning styles and needs of every student. They permit customization of learning ways, giving a personalized experience that can take special care of various inclinations and learning speeds.

Engagement: With interactive content, gamification elements, and multimedia resources, educational apps can make learning more engaging and interesting. This helps in maintaining students’ attention and motivation to learn.

Cost-Effective: Numerous educational apps offer free or reasonable admittance to an abundance of learning assets that could somehow be costly. This incorporates course books, lecture recordings, and practice works, making excellent training more cost-effective.

Instant Feedback: Learners can receive immediate feedback on quizzes and assignments, which is crucial for learning and improvement. Instant feedback helps students understand their mistakes and learn from them promptly.

Collaboration and Communication: Some educational apps work with cooperation among students and among students and teachers. They offer stages for discussions, group projects, and peer feedback, enhancing communication skills and teamwork.

Support for Special Needs: Educational applications can likewise offer particular substance for students with extraordinary necessities, giving open learning devices and assets that help their education.

Must-Have Features for Your Education App

Making an effective education app includes coordinating key elements that take special care of the necessities of students, teachers, and administrators. Here are must-have features for your education application to guarantee it’s effective, engaging, and widely adopted:

Interactive Content: Engage clients with intuitive elements, for example, tests, riddles, and games. Intelligent substance makes learning more agreeable as well as helps in better maintenance of information.

Multimedia Support: Use different types of media – text, pictures, recordings, and sound – to take special care of various learning styles. This assortment guarantees that the substance is available and drawing in for everybody.

Offline Access: Permit users to download content for offline viewing. This feature is vital for guaranteeing availability, particularly in regions with restricted or no internet connectivity.

Push Notifications: Use push notifications to help users remember their learning objectives, inform them about new content, and keep them engaged with the application. Warnings ought to be adaptable and not excessively successive to try not to be intrusive.

Social Learning Features: Integrate social features, for example, discussions, discussion channels, or gathering difficulties to cultivate a feeling of the local area. Social learning can upgrade inspiration and offer extra help through peer interactions.

Feedback Mechanism: Offer a straightforward way for users to give feedback on the application. User feedback is significant for continuous improvement and guaranteeing the application addresses the issues of its audience.

Regular Updates: Ensure the application is regularly updated with new content, features, and bug fixes. Keeping the application new and up-to-date is vital for holding clients and offering some benefits.

How to Develop Educational Apps

Identify Your Target Audience: Understand who your app is for (e.g., kids, high school students, professionals) and what their learning needs are. This will help you design content and features that resonate with your users.

Define Learning Objectives: Clearly outline what you want users to achieve with your app. Setting clear learning objectives guides the content and structure of your app, ensuring it delivers educational value.

Choose the Right Technology: Decide on the platform (iOS, Android, or both) and the technology stack for your app. Consider using cross-platform tools if you aim to cover multiple platforms to save on development time and costs.

Design for Engagement: Create an intuitive and attractive user interface that encourages engagement. Use gamification elements, interactive activities, and multimedia content to make learning enjoyable and effective.

Incorporate Personalization: Implement features that allow for personalized learning experiences, such as adaptive learning paths, personalized content recommendations, and progress tracking.

Test and Iterate: Before launching, test your app with a group of end-users to gather feedback on usability, content, and engagement. Use this feedback to make improvements. After launch, continue to update the app based on user feedback and analytics to enhance its effectiveness and user satisfaction.

Cost for Education App Development

Making an educational application can cost differently founded on a lot of things like how muddled the application is, what sort of unique stuff it has, on the off chance that it deals with iPhones, Androids, or both, and where individuals making the application are found. Basic applications that don’t do an excess of extravagant stuff could cost somewhat, beginning from two or three thousand bucks, and typically, they’re about $10,000 to $50,000.

However, if you want an app with all of the extra features, such as smart learning capabilities, fun interactive portions, and even fascinating 3D experiences, you may end up spending more than $100,000. Making an application isn’t just about building it; you likewise need to design, plan, test, and afterward keep it moving along as expected after it’s out there, which all adds to the expense.

You’ll likewise have to consider keeping up with the software up to date, remedying any bugs, and getting the news out.

If you’re contemplating making an educational app, you ought to initially sort out precisely the exact thing you believe it should do, then talk to some application-making specialists to find out about the amount it will cost to rejuvenate your thought.

To wrap it up, companies that make Education & E-Learning Software Development Apps Company are really changing how we learn in 2024. These apps are not just fun and personal; they also connect old-school learning with the latest tech. We’ve perceived how extraordinary these applications are – they let you learn from any place, make learning fun, and, surprisingly, let you learn in your own particular manner with loads of different tools.

Despite the fact that making these applications can cost a ton, it’s absolutely worth the effort since they’re making education better and open to everyone. Looking ahead, it’s super clear that these companies are super important in making learning better and more fun for people all over the world. Education’s future looks super exciting and digital, all thanks to the hard work and new ideas in making these educational apps.

Originally published by: Education App Development : Cost, Features and Example

#EducationApp #EducationAppDevelopment

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reportsjournal · 4 years

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E-Learing Market Analysis, Future Scope Analysis Featuing Industry Top Key players By 2027

Reports and Data has recently added a report titled E-Learing Market Report Forecast to 2026 to its repository, which comprises of data relating to the market size, share, value, and volume, production processes, revenue generation, the regional analysis of the business vertical, along with the outcomes of analytical tools including, SWOT analysis and Porter’s Five Forces analysis. The report highlights the growth opportunities and challenges that industry players might encounter in the forecast years, along with an elaborate competitive landscape and expansion strategies adopted by the companies functioning in the E-Learing Market.

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For the purpose of this report, Reports and Data have segmented global E-Learing market on the basis of product type, application, industry vertical, and region:

By Technology

Online Learning

Learning Management Systems (LMS)

Mobile Learning

Microlearning

Virtual Classrooms

By Application

Academic

K-12

Higher Education

Vocational Training

Corporate

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Large Enterprises

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By Application (Revenue, USD Million; 2017-2027)

Glass

Inks

Paints and coatings

Others

The key geographical regions analyzed in the report are:

• North America (U.S., Canada)

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saojip13 · 3 years

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Scope of LMS-Frontline Worker Training Industry 2021-2027

Over the last few decades, the LMS-Frontline Worker Training industry has recorded tremendous growth and as a result, has become increasingly competitive.

LMS-Frontline Worker Training Market research report manages numerous boundaries top to bottom to fulfil the prerequisites of business or customers. Additionally, it likewise shows all the data including market definition, classifications, key developments, applications, and commitment alongside the point-by-point activities of vital participants as for item dispatches, joint endeavours, improvements, consolidations and acquisitions, and impacts of something similar as far as deals, import, fare, income and CAGR values. A group of experienced and consummate statistical surveying experts steadily track key ventures to spot key turns of events, neglected requirements, and conceivable development openings.

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Top Companies in LMS-Frontline Worker Training Market Report: Some major key players for Global LMS-Frontline Worker Training Market are Blackboard Inc.(Providence Equity Partners LLC), Cornerstone, Adobe Captivate Prime, Oracle Corporation, D2L Corporation, Kenexa (IBM), McGraw Hill, Canvas LMS, CrossKnowledge, Latitude Learning,

Global LMS-Frontline Worker Training Market report is segmented on the basis of types, end user, application and region & country level.

Based upon types, global LMS-Frontline Worker Training market is classified into Collaborative Learning Content Management Talent Management Performance Management Others

Based upon application, it is classified as Information Technology Healthcare Transport Retail Manufacturing Telecommunication Food and Beverage Others

Regions Covered in this Report Asia-Pacific, Europe, North America, Middle East & Africa, and South America.

Research Coverage This report contemplates the LMS-Frontline Worker Training market dependent on item, administration model, evaluating model, deployment model, segment and locale. The report additionally contemplates factors (like drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges) influencing market development. It examinations the chances and difficulties on the lookout and gives subtleties of the cutthroat scene for market pioneers. Besides, the report investigations miniature business sectors as for their individual development patterns and gauges the income of the market portions regarding four fundamental locales and particular nations.

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Key Benefits of Buying the Report This report focuses on various levels of analysis—industry trends, market share of top players, and company profiles, which together form basic views and analyse the competitive landscape, emerging segments of the LMS-Frontline Worker Training market, and high-growth regions and their drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities. The report will help both established firms as well as new entrants/smaller firms to gauge the pulse of the market and garner greater market shares.

#LMS-Frontline Worker Training Industry

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theldsengineers-blog · 1 day

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LDS Engineers is a leading Canvas LMS Development Company in Australia, offering expert solutions to clients across the globe, including India, the UK, the US, and more. Our team of experienced programmers is highly skilled in developing and managing Canvas LMS applications, ensuring that every project meets the unique needs of our clients.

At LDS Engineers, we prioritize customer satisfaction and provide a user-friendly environment, making it easy for organizations to enhance their learning management systems. Our team is dedicated to delivering high-quality Canvas LMS solutions that are cost-effective, flexible, and tailored to a wide range of industries. Whether you’re a small business or a large organization, we have the expertise to develop a system that fits your needs perfectly.

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bharathshan · 3 years

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The Data Scientist course focuses on Python to build data science programming. The raw data processing, evaluation, and visualization kind part of the preparatory model. ExcelR's Applied AI/Machine Learning Courses are designed as whole learning experiences to help your journey from the first exercise to a new career.

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intellectualsprawl · 5 years

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School plans for infectious diseases

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I have gotten a few emails from administrators at nearby schools and one from across the country, asking for a copy of my updated infectious disease response. This is because in 2003 when the SARS outbreak approached California, I was involved in the development of our school’s plan, which was then shared with other schools — and my name and email address is on that memo, which several schools have now dug out of their hanging file folders (that’s how long ago 2003 was…).

I am no longer in an administrator role and have therefore directed those emails to folks at other schools who have prepared detailed plans worth sharing.

Below are some thoughts I’ve had which those going through this for the first time might want to consider.

Digital Schooling

Call it whatever you like (eg, Digital School, Digital Learning, Virtual Classes), most schools facing an extended closure have a plan for teaching and learning to continue in an online environment. This is of course predicated on several assumptions: students have mobile computing devices available, electricity in their homes, and internet access.1

To make this ‘digital schooling’ work, there is some nuance.

Employee Handbook

In 2003 most of our faculty was not yet using a website to organize course materials or post class assignments. To nudge faculty along this path, a brief section was added to the employee handbook, roughly stating:

In the event of an extended school closure, faculty will continue to be paid if they continue to teach.

LMS

A website and Macromedia Dreamweaver was adequate for posting assignments and providing digital copies of handouts, it was unidirectional communication, and in the case of an extended school shutdown, students need to do more: they need to take quizzes, post to forums, submit assignments — and faculty need to grade and provide feedback. All of this necessitates a modern learning management system (LMS).2 Frankly, I assume every school now has one; using it for two-way communication is a different story though.

Triggering mechanism

As one administrator told me, deciding when to close the campus and switch to virtual schooling “is the $64k question.” Most schools are not going public with their deciding factor. No school wants to be first; all are hoping that either a neighboring school does it first or that the government orders schools closed. Neither is adequate.

Those that have set a bright-line of their own have chosen “the first student diagnosed with coronavirus” and they’ll close the school. That’s not good enough either because the CDC says there is a 2- to 14-day incubation period, when someone is infected and is asymptomatic. That means: before a student is diagnosed, they will have been walking around, infecting others for between 2- and 14-days. Taking 7-days as an easy number to calculate, with COVID-19’s current R0 of 2.3, one infected individual can be the source of 300,000 other infections.

In short, by the time a student is diagnosed, they will already have spread it to the rest of the school.

If I had to create a policy for a school under these circumstances, instead of SARS, I’d tell parents and guardians: if anyone at your place of employment gets diagnosed, tell us, and we’ll close the campus.

The first student to contract COVID-19 will get it at home, and then bring it to campus. Shutting school down before that can happen is the key.

Policies which punish responsible choices

Further, consider students' and parents' unwillingness to call in sick. There are institutional punishments for that which need to be changed during times like this. Most schools have a policy akin to: “Miss X days, and not get credit for the course.” This drives sick kids to school where they simply infect others. Those policies need to be eliminated.

Social channel

Most schools assume that students have “the social media” and will keep in touch with friends and classmates there. If a school switches to ‘digital schooling’ it would be good for them to set up a system for students to stay in social contact with classmates. Imagine a school wide Slack channel and grade-level specific Slack channels. With some system like that, students will be able to stay in touch and maintain some semblance of social contact – just as they would at school. Further, by the school setting up the system, everyone is included (versus student-created group-chats, which will inevitably leave someone out, causing hurt), and the chatter can be monitored by the school.

Conclusion

The plan we developed in 2003 for the SARS outbreak is in some regards still the plan; in other ways, it needs to be modernized. No school needs to do this alone; there are experts around that are only too happy to provide assistance — from the NAIS down to the local unified school district. They key is deciding when to implement the campus shut-down, and then handling all of the necessary communication with parents and guardians well in advance of anything.

In 2003 we knew from previous polling that 2% of our students did not have internet access at home. To provide access for these students, we contracted with [Kajeet.com] to provide mobile access points which students could take home and plug into a wall outlet. ↩

After SARS and in preparation for an extended campus shutdown, we moved folks from individual websites to Moodle; now I‘m glad we’re using Canvas. ↩

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bluewatsons · 5 years

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S. Clelia Sweeney, Probing the Public Wound: The Serial Killer Character in True-Crime Media, Creating Knowledge 8 (2015)

It is two weeks before Halloween and I’m standing inside a tent with a man in smeared clown makeup shouting at me: “Are y’all ready to see some sick, twisted shit?” This is Rob Zombie’s Great American Nightmare, an attraction of three haunted houses set up in Villa Park, Illinois, and the last house on the tour has a serial killer theme. The outer façade is resplendent in sensationalistic Americana, with hay bales, jack-o-lanterns, rusted metal, a sharp-toothed taxidermy monkey, and gaudy signs advertising attractions inside. One painted clapboard sign reads, “SEE—the PSYCHO of PLAINFIELD—A TRUE CANNIBAL.” Inside, an actor portraying that “psycho” leers from a workbench piled with eviscerated plastic bodies, helping to create a recreational thrill based in real-life tragedy, a thrill that also oddly evoked hints of an (almost) nostalgic 1950s Americana. Ed Gein is the famous killer the sign is referencing and the actor is portraying; in bucolic 1950s Plainfield, Wisconsin, Gein robbed graves, murdered two women, and allegedly cannibalized corpses. He is most notorious for making taxidermy-like items out of human bodies. As psychologist George W. Arndt recounts from photographs of the farmhouse interior, “Ten human skulls neatly arranged in a row, books on anatomy, embalming equipment, pulp magazines, furniture upholstered in human skin, and dirty kerosene lamps completed the macabre scene.”1 Those grisly photographs, published as part of a Life magazine 6-page cover story about the crimes on December 2, 1957, circulated the depraved inner world of Ed Gein (later referred to as “The Ghoul of Plainfield”) across the nation.

A sign almost exactly like the one outside Rob Zombie’s Great American Nightmare was once hung outside a carnival tent in 1958 to advertise a strikingly similar exhibition of serial killer entertainment. At the 1958 fair, a reconstructed murder scene featured wax dummies in the actual car Gein drove when he committed his crimes. As Harold Schechter recounts in his biography of Gein, “The ‘Ed Gein ghoul car’ made its first public appearance in July 1958 at the Outgamie County Fair in Seymour, Wisconsin, where it was displayed for three days inside a large canvas tent covered with blaring signs—‘SEE THE CAR THAT HAULED THE DEAD FROM THEIR GRAVES! YOU READ IT IN ‘LIFE’ MAGAZINE! IT’S HERE! ED GEIN’S CRIME CAR! $1,000 REWARD IF NOT TRUE!’”2 The exhibit was soon shut down by public outcry, but Ed Gein endured as a celebrity monster in America, inspiring iconic horror movies such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Psycho (1960).3

Serial killers—both real and fictional—proliferate in lm, television shows, true-crime novels, magazines, internet culture, and in the lexicon of Americana. True-crime entertainment commodities the tragedy surrounding serial killers, and often makes them into scapegoated representations of human “evil.” From the 1980s to the 1990s true-crime media representations of serial killers radically shifted. In the 1980s, the serial killer was generally cast as an irredeemable freak; by the 1990s the media framed serial killer entertainment almost as scientific inquiry whereby spectators were invited to delve into the killers’ psychology, to understand what made them tick and why they killed.

I argue that this shift can be attributed to the advent of therapy culture during this decade, as well as to the appearance of likable serial killer protagonists in lm. Therapy culture, a term coined by sociologist Frank Furedi, describes the phenomenon whereby unusual momentous events are processed in a collective psychological way and understood in terms of their emotional impact and influence on individual mental health.4 Furedi notes that when therapeutic analysis enters the public sphere, “it ceases to be a clinical technique and becomes an instrument for the management of subjectivity.”5 In other words, because the therapy is public it is not meant to bene t a “patient” so much as to influence how the audience perceives the subject. Moreover, therapy culture can be used to describe a culture wherein psychiatric principles have become generally normalized in the public sphere, encouraging more empathetic understanding of the once-unknowable other; it can also be used to describe the psychological conventions of confessional television.

In terms of confessional television in the 1990s, therapy culture was visible on tabloid talk shows such as Oprah Winfrey, Jenny Jones, and Jerry Springer. These shows encouraged participants to lay bare the pain of their lives for an audience, ostensibly to encourage healing and resolution but in reality more for voyeuristic entertainment. Media historian Mimi White provides an astute critique of this in her book on television-as-therapy: “In relation to television’s therapy programs the terms of the debate are relatively obvious: Are the programs helpful and educational or harmful and distorting? Do they promote more openness and understanding about emotional problems or turn real human suffering into television spectacle for the sake of profits?”6 White places the origin of this confessional talk-show television-as-therapy trend at the end of the 1980s and connects it to the idea of social therapy, meaning an attempt to heal the public wound caused by social trauma and crime:

. . . there is a sense that participating as the confessional subject is part of the therapeutic ethos projected by television: telling one’s story on television is part of the process of recovery (and repetition). At the same time this confers on participants a sense of celebrity. Their stories are told on national television, and they get to participate as actors and expert witnesses. . . In certain of these shows...there is also a sense of a socially therapeutic mission, as exposing unsolved crimes on television has led to the apprehension of a number of criminal suspects.7

Often true-crime shows interview victims’ families who discuss their own pain in relation to the crime and often cry on camera—which suggests that televised interviews can be cathartic and healing. Victims’ families have served as the “expert witnesses” that White refers to, but so have serial killers themselves, which plays to the audience’s empathetic engagement with the crime-story narrative.

Rather than the mainstream, normalized sphere of the talk show, serial killers have tended to occupy the space provided by true-crime television shows such as Blood, Lies & Alibis, Born to Kill?, and Most Evil. Such shows capitalize on public interest in the grotesque and present murderers as socially deviant subjects, appropriate for study. These shows, Most Evil in particular, employ psychopathic rhetoric in order to frame the serial killers as born freaks with psychological disorders. The audience is trained as armchair detectives and armchair psychologists, with serial killers made into case studies. These celebrity monsters help maintain the social dichotomy of normalcy and deviance, placing the audience in the authoritative, “normal” role of diagnostician, trained—vis à vis true-crime television—to look for clues as to how deviancy may have developed through experiences in the killers’ childhoods.

While public fascination with gruesome crimes is nothing new, psychiatric media representations of serial killers shows a cultural need to unmask the monster and prove him/her human. The television viewer can disavow the serial killer of some of his/her power and mystique when they subject them to psychological analyses. This process also functions as a cathartic experience for the television viewer, partaking in what cultural critic Mark Seltzer has termed “wound culture,”—that is, the social phenomenon of gathering around a site of public trauma to look at, experience, and process its tragedy collectively. While wound culture describes a human need to collectively process and congregate around a site of trauma, therapy culture defines the form that processing can take. Seltzer also situates wound culture in the culture of the 1990s: “The crowd gathers around the fallen body, the wrecked machine, and the wound has become commonplace in our culture: a version of collective experience that centers the pathological public sphere. The current à-la-modality of trauma—the cliché du jour of the therapeutic society of the nineties—makes this clear enough.”8 This kind of response may be at its most intense in the immediate aftermath of the crime, but the media that ensues carries on this ethos. In this way, true-crime entertainment and endless news coverage can be seen as poking at the wound, probing it for further reactions.

Drawing on analyses of two documentaries on crime and murder from the 1980s (Murder: No Apparent Motive and The Killing of America), a televised 1.5-hour 1994 interview with Jeffrey Dahmer, and an archetypal episode of the 2006-2008 show Most Evil, this essay shows how the serial killer character has been used in American media as a psychological deviant, or freak of consciousness: a figure assigned with the role of deviant Other in order to assert the viewing public’s feelings of normalcy. With the advent of disability rights, it is currently much more acceptable to exhibit freaks of consciousness than freaks of body9 (as would populate a traditional circus freakshow), and serial killers are in some sense the ultimate end-result of this framing of the freak. Modern true-crime media about the serial killer makes spectacle seem acceptable by psychologizing the subject and emphasizing the emotional, psychic impact of crimes on the psychic sphere. This is a distinct shift from the 1980s, where the question posed by this strain of media was much more about the what than the why. Handling serial killers in the mode of 1990s confessional television, which continues to the present, strips these murderers of some of their frightening mystique. They are still sensationalized as monsters, used for thrills-and- chills shock value, but also framed as “sick,” “psychotic,” “disturbed” individuals who can be pitied and studied in a psychological manner.

The 1980s: Serial Killers—Who Are They and How Can They Be Caught?

In the late 1970s there was a tremendous sense of fear in the country, with new killers seeming to appear every couple of years. For example, 1978 alone saw the arrest of three serial killers: Richard Chase, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy. Soon after, in 1983, the FBI publicized their serial killer profile, which framed serial murder as a contemporary American epidemic. Of course serial murder is not a modern, nor an exclusively American, phenomenon. Nor did the FBI coin the term “serial killer,” as it had already been in circulation in the criminological community for over a decade.10 Nevertheless, the FBI popularized the term along with their profile, which defined the serial killer as “public enemy number one” in America and elected FBI profiler Robert Ressler as the ultimate authority on the subject.

In the emotionally grueling documentary lm The Killing of America (1982), made up entirely of real footage of crimes, the serial killer emerges as the ultimate fear—a senseless, random, brutal killer. The film is filled with scenes of panic and disorder, shouting, violence, urban decay, and punctuated with a voice-over from an unseen, hard-boiled male narrator. The narrator intones things like, “An attempted murder every three minutes. A murder victim every 20 minutes.” And, “Bodies and more bodies. All day, every day. Guns. And more guns.”11 The lm does not incorporate emotional nuance or psychological elements, but drums its message of fear into the audience through stark, disturbing facts. The experts are all police officers and FBI profilers, and FBI profiler Robert Ressler appears prominently. There is no psychological intrigue in The Killing of America, which frames the serial killer as one symptom of a larger cultural degeneracy. The film traces a downward arc from John F. Kennedy’s assassination to the the “epidemic” of senseless sex-maniac killing. There is an extensive interview with serial killer Edmund Kemper, but that interview is not presented as a psychological study. For example, although Kemper experienced an abusive childhood, the interview does not focus on his formative history, but instead focuses on the details and circumstances of Kemper’s crimes. This focus on the what rather than the why exemplifies this period of true- crime media, and early perceptions of the serial killer. While a 2007 episode of Most Evil presents Kemper first with a child actor staring into the camera, The Killing of America does not linger long in the killer’s mind nor attempt to humanize him in any way, despite appearing “in person” for the documentary. Kemper’s opening line is, “I’m an American and I went off the deep end.” He makes some effort to humanize himself, but the lm does not help him do so. The ominous, deep music and deadpan narration accentuate serial killers’ irredeemable violence and work to instill fear in the audience—not aid us in psychological understanding.

This fear-mongering is only brought further to the forefront in the documentary Murder: No Apparent Motive (1984).12 The serial killer is again framed as incomprehensible in this documentary, akin to a destructive force of nature rather than an individual human psyche. Robert Ressler is also featured in this film; lecturing to a college classroom, he stresses the “motivelessness” of serial murder, and creates a sense of urgency in needing to capture these dangerous deviants. Murder: No Apparent Motive creates fear in the audience by emphasizing the vital importance of apprehending serial killers, and the difficulties that come with that. Robert Ressler falsely claims that “The crimes you’re seeing today did not really occur with any known frequency prior to the ‘50s,” possibly suggesting that serial murders were the result of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s.

Of note, Murder: No Apparent Motive shares the same aesthetic conventions as its predecessor, The Killing of America, including an ominous, droning soundtrack and a gravel-throated narrator. Social historian Joy Wiltenburg, in her essay on true-crime, writes that, “Sensationalist crime accounts build their emotional potency in both a visceral response to violence itself and the quasi-religious dilemma posed by transgression of core values.”13 In Murder: No Apparent Motive, the visceral emotional response is pure dread. We are urged to take the role of armchair detectives by listening to police officers and profilers discuss the techniques used to catch these modern monsters. The goal is fairly straightforward: define the enemy, display the enemy, outline their deviancy, and scare the audience into believing this constitutes impending danger to their own personal safety.

The 1990s: Jeffrey Dahmer—The Sympathetic Face of Serial Murder

At the start of the 1990s, the serial killer began to be probed psychologically. Shows like America’s Most Wanted—hosted by John Walsh, whose 6-year-old son was viciously murdered in 1981—proliferated in true-crime entertainment. The first day in the year 1991 saw the arrest of Aileen Wuornos, the only female serial killer to enter the 20th-century canon of serial killer celebrities. But one serial killer arrest that can be said to have shaped the decade was that of Jeffrey Dahmer in July of 1991.

Titillation and narrative intrigue in true-crime television can come from dangers inherent in the serial killer passing as normal through his/her outward appearance. This absence of physical freakishness may actually enhance the effectiveness of the serial-killer-as-freak: “More than destroying the peace, the psychopath shatters our complacency that comes from not knowing that dangerousness cannot be detected by body type. . . ”14 The boy-next-door psychopath character takes its emotional potency from this idea, and plays o of pervasive fears about one’s own security in a society capable of producing the serial killer. This narrative lens is especially pervasive in the coverage of Jeffrey Dahmer, dubbed by tabloids as the Milwaukee Cannibal. Dahmer’s crimes were highly sensationalized because of their bizarre nature, but also because of his appearance and personality; Jeffrey Dahmer was polite, soft-spoken, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, and deferential. In his 1994 interview with Jeffrey Dahmer, NBC’s Stone Phillips intones to the camera, “How could a seemingly normal Midwestern boy grow up to commit such terrible crimes?” The cultural anxiety resulting from this difficulty in spotting such deviant people in our midst—the freak of consciousness who keeps his/her perversion hidden—arguably generates wider interest in serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer. Moreover, Dahmer wholeheartedly embraced the television talk-therapy offered to him by NBC and Inside Edition (who also televised an interview with him), thereby creating an extensive and intimate media portrait of himself.

The Stone Phillips interview is essentially structured like public family therapy for Je rey Dahmer and his parents (Lionel Dahmer and Joyce Flint, divorced). The purpose of the interview is emotional truth, with Dahmer being continually urged to elaborate on his feelings about his past and his crimes. In contrast to the focus on the what of the crimes that we saw in the 1980s, in this 1.5-hour- long interview the criminal actions are mentioned far less than the killer’s childhood and feelings. It might have been that the case was already so widely publicized that this program was focused not on straight reporting, but on letting Je rey Dahmer tell “his side of the story,” so to speak. Talk therapy becomes a discursive strategy to get more luridly personal details out of Dahmer and also to encourage public preoccupation with the memory of his case—probing private wounds from his past that have become public. Allowing Je rey Dahmer televised family therapy has the potential to generate feelings of radical empathy in the audience on his behalf; alternately, it increases dramatic pitch in the absence of breaking news and makes for better television.

Towards the end of the interview, Stone Phillips turns to Je rey with an expression of overly-contrived earnestness and says, “Your father told me one of the reasons he wrote this book [A Father’s Story, a memoir] was in order to put down on paper what he has been unable to say to you in words, kind of reaching out to you. Is there anything you want to say to him, having read this?”15 Je rey then apologizes to his dad, they exchange a one-armed hug, and the camera zooms in on Lionel resting his hand comfortingly on Je rey’s arm. Phillips mediates between the two men in the way a family therapist would, asking “pointed questions” (his term) about Je rey’s crimes while also probing for emotional reasoning and humanizing details from Je rey’s life. Despite all of this seemingly sympathetic, gentle emotional prodding, Dahmer is still framed as a freak as well as an “unnervingly normal” man. In his closing statement Phillips mentions Dahmer’s weak handshake, bringing up a gay stereotype to magnify his social deviance, and describes the whole interview experience as “eerie.”

Of note, Dahmer’s arrest coincided with the release of The Silence of the Lambs, a blockbuster lm featuring an anti-hero cannibal killer. Although Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter was not modeled on Jeffrey Dahmer, their collision in popular consciousness caused their cultural presences to play off of each other. But fictional Hannibal Lecter offered a much more acceptable portrait of deviancy than Dahmer did, more akin to a dashing noir villain than a sad, lonely murderer. Lecter, portrayed by acclaimed Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins, offered a compelling portrait of a serial killer protagonist as guru to Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) and charming psychopath whose performance arguably steals the lm. Notably, Hopkins had only 16 minutes of screen-time, the shortest amount of time ever to win an actor an Oscar.16 Hopkins’ Lecter powerfully influenced the serial killer character in American culture.17 The urbanity, genius, and high-functioning psychopathy of a character like Lecter combined with the theatrical air of Hopkins’ gleefully evil performance enhanced the kind of awed respect generated by the serial killer. Furthermore, part of Hannibal Lecter’s backstory is that he was a practicing psychiatrist, giving him insight into how to best manipulate people to his own ends and characterizing him as an “evil mastermind” serial killer. Fictional characters such as Hannibal Lecter (or more recently, Dexter), arguably contribute as much to the public-consciousness image of the serial killer as their widely-publicized real-life counterparts. Both are contained within a star text that feeds off of the same public curiosity and “mawkish disapproval that is the ip-side of titillation.”18

Serial Killers in the 21st Century: Subjects of Analysis and Americana By the mid-2000s, the primary focus of true-crime shows dealing with serial killers was psychoanalysis and emotional reception. The show Most Evil (2006-2008) centered around the “Scale of Evil” developed by Columbia University forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone, and each episode examined a handful of killers’ case files to see where they fell on the scale. There are establishing shots of Dr. Stone sitting at his typewriter, looking through a microscope, and flipping through his filing cabinet to find a folder marked with the killer’s name. The atmosphere of the show is meant to be frightening and creepy, but more subtly so than those we saw in the 1980s. Frequent reconstructions begin with a child actor staring eerily at the camera while a voice-over introduces the serial killer’s (often traumatic) childhood story. The cases are simplified in order to neatly t a diagnosis, allowing a handful of cases to be covered in the course of one episode. The show is framed as edifying and educational by its concluding voice-over narration: “For these criminals, Dr. Stone considers their genetic, constitutional, environmental, and neurological factors when placing them on the scale. He believes that evil is something to be understood and analyzed, with the hopes of one day helping us not only to understand, but to guard against their crimes.” Through their specatorship, the audience is poised to be thrilled at watching re-enactments and in hearing about transgressive violence and perverse crimes; they are also poised to feel morally superior to the killers, and to feel educated on how to guard against these “killers next door.”

To take an example, an episode from Season Two, entitled “Masterminds,” pro les three serial killers at length: Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy, and Ted Kaczynski. The professed goal of the program is to track their “transformation” into serial killers, presenting each case beginning with a childhood retrospective. The voice- over narrator is British, despite this being an American program, a characteristic usually meant to inject a kind of sophisticated credibility. In contrast to the gravelly, hard-boiled narrator of 1980s true-crime films, this man speaks in a measured, almost conversational tone that could just as easily be applied to a documentary on an entirely non- violent subject. This is not to say that the program is above the occasional jolt of sensationalism: “To find the roots of Kemper’s sadism, Dr. Stone examined his past. He uncovered nightmarish details.”19 Cue commercial break.

In contrast to previous generations of true-crime shows, Most Evil encourages intellectual engagement rather than reactive fear in the audience. The background music is calm and meditative, with subdued single notes played on a piano over atmospheric noises. The atmosphere created is one of delicate tension, occasionally disrupted by a flourish of dramatic cellos. When examining frame composition, the action occurring is subtle. In dramatic reconstructions, the serial killer character (actor) often stares into the camera, playing with an object in his hands; in Kemper’s case, the actor slowly pulls the stuffing out of his sister’s doll. Despite such arguable, eerie scenes, Most Evil presents subtly reproduced violence, depicting serial killers in moments of solitude and relative non-violence, possibly encouraging a more empathetic reaction in the audience. To portray the inner anguish of the killers’ psyches, extreme close-ups from skewed angles are used to jarring effect. A sense of disorientation is created by shooting an image very close and blurry then bringing it into sharp focus, adding to the tense atmosphere of the program.

Most Evil uses real-life footage of serial killers sparingly, preferring instead to provide re-enactments or to share “evidence” drawn from psychiatric and neurobiological studies; in Season 2, Episode 8, for example, studies on brain activity in autistic children who are unable to feel empathy (like psychopaths) are meant to lend insight into Bundy and Kaczynski. Psychiatric professionals (rather than FBI criminal profilers) are centered as authorities, thereby aligning the audience’s perspective with their vantage point of clinical analysis. Pleasure in the show lies in this blatant invitation to be armchair psychiatrists who are equipped (by virtue of their spectatorship) to rank the show’s subjects on Dr. Stone’s Scale of Evil.

One odd feature of true-crime entertainment in the 21st century thus far is the emergence of an American serial killer canon of sorts. This canon comprises approximately 18 serial killers from the 20th century who are used again and again as television subjects and objects of fascination. Although there have been more serial killers arrested since the 2000s, none have achieved the level of fame or impact that these canonical killers have. Biopic programs about these serial killers’ lives are aired on the Biography Channel alongside those of people like Tiger Woods and Marilyn Monroe, in a sense assimilating them into mainstream culture as historical figures and celebrities. This could be because these serial killers are usually no longer a threat— being either dead or incarcerated. By framing them as subjects of clinical psychiatric study and figures from America’s past, the serial killer garners more fascination than fear and earns a place as a figure of Americana. There has been speculation that serial killers already fit seamlessly into American mythology, that they embody an individualistic ethos and have an outlaw/vigilante justice appeal. However misguided this may be, serial killers are undeniably compelling characters and their celebrity seems to have solidi ed into a recognizable mass over the course of the 20th century—confirmed and brought to a narrative conclusion by the criminal crack-down the 1980s and the pop-cultural mass media explosion of the 1990s.

Probing the Public Wound

David Schmid has argued that serial killers have generally been “depicted as monstrous psychopaths, whose crimes tell us little or nothing about the societies in which they live [and that true-crime narratives disconnect these individuals from the social fabric in order to present them as aberrations or freaks.”20 In contrast, I have argued that we can increasingly see true-crime media moving toward a psychological understanding and (slowly) away from mere condemnations of the serial killer as incomprehensible and inhuman monsters. In looking at the depictions of serial killers from the 1980s to the present, we can see how serial killers have come a long way through their media incarnations, from being discussed as an unstoppable epidemic to being considered individually and painstakingly through the lens of psychoanalysis (and pop psychoanalysis).

Whenever we see a reviled social Other being widely used as a stock character in mass-culture entertainment, we can conclude that the dominant culture is attempting to disavow that group of some threatening power or influence it holds. Serial killers’ crimes have tremendous frightening power because they threaten security, anonymity, and public normalcy. The true- crime media we consume about them satisfies a public need to understand and process their crimes while simultaneously satisfying an underlying desire to see violent acts recounted/reenacted, to be emotional voyeurs into other people’s tragedies, and to look at an extraordinarily deviant person who chose to live outside the laws and norms of society. This desire to consume the Other through media representations belongs to a longer history of freak show entertainment and has been incorporated into the modern context of therapy culture by using the serial killer as a freak of consciousness. However shameful or wrong it may seem, the serial killer is part of the Americana lexicon and will continue to occupy public imagination through various media incarnations for a long time to come.

Footnotes

George W. Arndt, “Community Reactions to a Horrifying Event,” in Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, XXIII (New York: Guilford Publications, 1959), 106.

Harold Schechter, Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho” (New York: Pocket Books, 1998), 216.

Dane Placko, “Rob Zombie’s haunted house has John Wayne Gacy room,” Fox News Chicago (Oct 5 2014), http://www.myfoxchicago.com/story/26669431/rob-zombies.

Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London: Routledge, 2004), 12.

Furedi, Therapy Culture, 22.

White, Mimi, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 29.

White, Tele-Advising, 182.

Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Life and Death in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 22.

David and Mikita Brottman, “Return of the Freakshow: Carnival (De) Formations in Contemporary Culture,” in Studies in Popular Culture (Louisville: Popular Culture Association in the South, 1996), 100.

David Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2005), 69.

The Killing of America, directed by Sheldon Renan and Leonard Schrader, 1981. YouTube video (Aug 8 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdfFmTFY_JE.

Murder: No Apparent Motive, directed by Imre Horvath, 1984. YouTube video (Mar 15 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRv8uOnvRBc.

Joy Wiltenburg, “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” in The American Historical Review (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 1379.

Cary Federman, Dave Holmes, and Jean Daniel Jacob, “Deconstructing the Psychopath: A Critical Discursive Analysis,” in Cultural Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 40.

“Confessions of a Serial Killer: Jeffrey Dahmer” Jeffrey Dahmer, interview by Stone Phillips, MSNBC, February 1994. YouTube video, (July 8 2012). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPMBfX7D4WU.

The Silence of the Lambs (Two-Disc Collector’s Edition), directed by Jonathan Demme (1991; Los Angeles, CA: MGM, 2007). DVD.

Philip L. Simpson, “Lecter for President. . . or, Why We Worship Serial Killers,” in Cult Pop Culture: How the Fringe Became Mainstream, Vol. 1 (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), 84.

Lisa Downing, The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 93.

Most Evil, “Masterminds,” Season 2, Episode 8, September 30, 2007. YouTube video (Jan 7 2014).

Schmid, Natural Born Celebrities, 176.

Bibliography

Arndt, George W. “Community Reactions to a Horrifying Event.” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, XXIII. New York: Guilford Publications, 1959.

Biressi, Anita. “Inside/Out: Private Trauma and Public Knowledge in True Crime Documentary.” Screen, Vol. 45, No. 4. Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 2004.

Brottman, David and Mikita. “Return of the Freakshow: Carnival (De) Formations in Contemporary Culture.” Studies in Popular Culture, Vol. 8, No. 2. Louisville: Popular Culture Association in the South, 1996.

Chemers, Michael M. Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

“Confessions of a Serial Killer: Jeffrey Dahmer.” Jeffrey Dahmer, interview by Stone Phillips, MSNBC, February 1994. YouTube video. July 8, 2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPMBfX7D4WU.

Conrath, Robert. “The Guys Who Shoot to Thrill: Serial Killers and the American Popular Unconscious.” Revue française d’études américaines, No. 60. Paris: Editions Belin, 1994.

Dovey, Jon. Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual Television. London: Pluto Press, 2000.

Downing, Lisa. The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Federman, Cary; Holmes, Dave; and Jacob, Jean Daniel. “Deconstructing the Psychopath: A Critical Discursive Analysis.” Cultural Critique, Vol. 72. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Furedi, Frank. Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age. London: Routledge, 2004.

Globe Magazine Special Issue: Serial Killers, Display until October 20, 2014.

The Killing of America. Directed by Sheldon Renan and Leonard Schrader. 1981. YouTube video. August 8, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdfFmTFY_JE.

Most Evil. “Masterminds,” Season 2, Episode 8. September 30, 2007. YouTube video. January 7, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXmXj2Hm8pA.

Murder: No Apparent Motive. Directed by Imre Horvath. 1984. YouTube video. March 15, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRv8uOnvRBc.

Placko, Dane. «Rob Zombie›s haunted house has John Wayne Gacy room.» Fox News Chicago, Oct 5 2014. http://www.myfoxchicago.com/ story/26669431/rob-zombies.

Schechter, Harold. Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho.” New York: Pocket Books, 1998.

Schmid, David. Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Serial Killer Culture. Directed by John Borowski. 2014. Toronto, Ontario: Waterfront Productions, 2014. Hulu video. www.hulu.com/watch/664916.

Simpson, Philip L. “Lecter for President. . . or, Why We Worship Serial Killers.” Cult Pop Culture: How the Fringe Became Mainstream, Volume One, edited by Bob Batchelor, 83-96. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012.

The Silence of the Lambs (Two-Disc Collector’s Edition). Directed by Jonathan Demme. 1991. Los Angeles, CA: MGM, 2007.

White, Mimi. Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Wiltenburg, Joy. “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 5. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

#serial murder #serial killers #media #sensationalism #crime #deviance #society

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Looking for Trusted Advisers? Look No Further

Summer is the push-pull of regeneration and rejuvenation: Should I spend my summer weeks learning my craft or relaxing? Me, I have no regular winner but the more convenient learning is, the more likely I’ll squeeze a goodly quantity of learning into my vacation that serves me in the long run. Where years ago, that used to be attending a conference at an out-of-town hotel that required traveling expenses, now, I’m more likely to pick online classes. In fact, I’ve talked about these choices in other posts. Today, I want to talk about podcasts, webinars, and screencasts of knowledgeable educators who quickly can become your trusted advisors on a wide variety of education topics.

Here are my favorites:

Alice Keeler

Blog: Teacher Tech with Alice Keeler

Books: Get Started with Google Classroom, Ditch That Homework, and more

Training: Go Slow Online Workshops, CoffeeEdu, and more

Social Media: @alicekeeler, YouTube

Alice Keeler is a Google Certified Teacher, New Media Consortium K12 Ambassador, Microsoft Innovative Educator and LEC Admin & Online and Blended certified. Professor of Curriculum, Instruction and Technology at California State University Fresno and Teacher on Special Assignment at ACEL Charter High school. She has developed and taught online K12 courses as well as the Innovative Educator Advanced Studies Certificate (cue.org/ieasc). Her goal: to inspire and help teachers to try something new. With a boatload of accolades, certifications, and followers, she is often a keynote or presenter at ISTE and CUE conferences and is the number one choice for those interested in anything Google.

Cult of Pedagogy

Blog: Cult of Pedagogy

Books: The Teacher’s Guide to Tech 2017, Hacking Education

Training: Jumpstart: A Technology Course for Thoughtful Educators, Twitter for Teachers and Students

Social Media: @cultofpedagogy, iTunes podcast

Jennifer Gonzalez is the voice behind the team that is Cult of Pedagogy. She is a National Board Certified Teacher and author with broad pedagogical and technical knowledge, down-to-earth honest, and a sense of humor. She is a welcome presenter at keynotes, lectures, and workshops. She is integral to Cult of Pedagogy’s commitment to making teachers awesome in the classroom. The website offers videos (on instruction, classroom management, edtech, advice, and more), podcasts, free materials, and lots more through their Teachers Pay Teachers store. All are focused on teaching strategies, classroom management, education reform, educational technology — anything to do with teaching,

Eric Curts

Blog: Control Alt Achieve

Training: anything on using Google in the classroom

Social Media: @ericcurts, YouTube

Eric Curts is an Authorized Google Education Trainer, a Google Certified Innovator, host of monthly “What’s New to Google” online meetings, and a popular knowledgable presenter at many tech-in-ed conferences and meetings. He has provided thousands of hours of training and consulting for schools and organizations all across Ohio and around the country for more than twenty years. This includes dozens of tech training topics, Certification bootcamps, conference presentations (such as ISTE, ITIP, and . He specializes in everything Google and Chromebook for teachers and administrators but has been known to cover other topics as well.

FreeTech4Teachers

Blog: FreeTech4Teachers

Training: Google apps, webtools for educators

Social Media: @rmbyrne, YouTube

Richard Byrne is a former high school social studies teacher at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in Maine. He is a popular speaker at events worldwide discussing tech-in-ed topics focused on sharing free web-based resources that enhance student learning experiences. He is a five five-timeer of the Edublogs Awards, a Google Certified Teacher, winner of the California State University Merlot Classics award, finalist for ACTEM’s (Association of Computer Teachers and Educators in Maine) educator of the year award, and one of Tech & Learning Magazine’s”people to watch” in their 30th Anniversary celebration. His popular quick YouTube webinars (most two-five minutes) focus on free webtools, Google Tools, and other useful webtools for teachers.

Jamie Keet and Teachers.Tech

Blog: Teachers.Tech

Training: How to Set up the Digital Classroom

Social Media: Facebook, YouTube Channel

Jamie Keet, MEd, has taught K-12 for over fifteen years and led many PD days coaching other teachers in the integration of technology into learning. He is a Google for Education Certified Trainer and Google Certified Innovator.

Kathy Schrock

Blog: Kathy Schrock’s Guide to Everything

Social Media: @kathyschrock

Kathy Schrock has been a school district Director of Technology, an instructional technology specialist, and a middle school, academic, museum, and public library librarian, and is currently an online adjunct professor for Wilkes University (PA) and an independent educational technologist. She is an Adobe Education Leader Emeritus, a Google Certified Innovator, an Amazon Teacher Innovator, an Apple Teacher 2016, an Alpha Squirrel, a ThingLink Certified Educator, a MakerBot Curriculum Creator, and a Discovery Education Guru. Besides teaching online, Kathy conducts professional development workshops, presents at conferences such as ISTE, and keynotes both nationally and internationally. Kathy’s passions are online tools to support classroom instruction, the role of emerging technologies in the classroom, infographics, tablets in the classroom, assessment and rubrics, copyright and intellectual property, and gadgets of any type.

Monica Burns

Blog: Class Tech Tips

Books: Tasks Before Apps: Designing Rigorous Learning in a Tech-Rich Classroom (ASCD), #FormativeTech: Meaningful, Sustainable, and Scannable Formative Assessment with Technology (Corwin), Deeper Learning with QR Codes and Augmented Reality(Corwin), and co-author of Taming the Wild Text: Literacy Strategies for Today’s Reader (Shell).

Training: How to make technology integration exciting and accessible

Social Media: @ClassTechTips

Dr. Monica Burns is a Curriculum and EdTech Consultant, Apple Distinguished Educator and vocal advocate for bringing one-to-one technology into classrooms. She has presented to teachers, administrators and tech-enthusiasts at numerous national and international conferences including SXSWedu, ISTE, FETC and EduTECH. She is a webinar host for SimpleK12 and a regular contributor to Edutopia.

Technology for Teachers and Students

Social Media: @TechForEducate, Facebook, YouTube

The dozens of videos on this YouTube channel have helped over 8 million visitors learn how to use a wide range of educational websites and tech tools in the classroom. Topics include Adobe, PowerPoint, Office Sway, multimedia, MS Office, Excel, Teacher Tools, Technology Hacks, Tech Gadgets, Google, Website design, Formative Assessment, Canvas LMS, and more.

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The sources above cover everything teachers need in their classroom but each expert specializes in one or more topics. Look them over carefully and select what works best for you.

–published first on TeachHUB