Best Tech Tools for Gifted Students

First a dis­claimer: If you read that title and thought, “Oh cool, another list of [sites/​games/​activities] I can plug into my [instruction/​centers/​homework/​busywork] to keep my gifted kids [challenged/​engaged/​occupied/​from bug­ging me],” then this is not the post you were look­ing for.

Next a con­fes­sion: I tend to find those sorts of posts dis­ap­point­ing at best and dis­cour­ag­ing at worst, for sev­eral reasons:

• They are often a col­lec­tion of what Alton Brown might call “dig­i­tal uni­taskers”: sites and soft­ware that do one narrowly-​​defined thing, some­times very well. A good exam­ple is the often praised SpellingC​ity​.com. While it does spelling drill extremely well, that’s all it does. At their worst, uni­taskers do some­thing that is done just as well (or bet­ter) by other tools. If there is any­one in the world who actu­ally needs the banana slicer pic­tured above.…
• They tend to focus on sites fill­ing a niche. If you’re teach­ing den­tal hygiene, for exam­ple, Healthy​Teeth​.org has some great resources. If you’re not, then my men­tion­ing it won’t help you much.
• The sites linked in these posts fre­quently amount to lit­tle more than text­books with ani­ma­tion or auto­mated drill-​​and-​​practice. Check out the 4-​​H Vir­tual Farm, a well-​​designed, engag­ing, col­or­ful site which is very appeal­ing to young children. Unfortunately there is lit­tle for stu­dents to do beyond click­ing links to read para­graphs about aqua­cul­ture or view videos of peo­ple train­ing horses. A few sec­tions are slightly inter­ac­tive, but the student’s role is almost com­pletely passive.

Don’t mis­un­der­stand me. There is a place for all of these kinds of tools. I myself have used them, and even cre­ated one when I didn’t find the niche tool I needed. My prob­lem is that they are over­hyped (“This is the great­est site for 3^rd graders ever!”) and improp­erly used as pre­fab filler or busy work.

What I want for my gifted kids, though, are more oppor­tu­ni­ties to par­tic­i­pate in high-​​level activ­i­ties with depth, and to have expe­ri­ences they could not have on their own in the class­room. I want my stu­dents cre­at­ing, eval­u­at­ing, prov­ing, argu­ing, defend­ing, per­suad­ing, con­struct­ing, inves­ti­gat­ing, inter­pret­ing, pre­dict­ing and imagining.

Those tools are out there, and I am aware of many of them. My New Year’s blog res­o­lu­tion is to find more and share them with you. Here are a few of the kinds of tools that I will talk about over the next few days and weeks. Most of these are not new—my goal is to dis­cuss the par­tic­u­lar aspects that make them ideal for teach­ing gifted stu­dents. Tell me in the com­ments what else you’d like to see, or if you have used sites that allow the kind of open-​​ended prob­lem solv­ing I’m look­ing for.

• Blog­ging
• Wikis
• Pod­casts
• Inter­ac­tive Fiction
• Inter­net “Hoaxes”
• Web Design and Programming
• Vir­tual Environments

[Note: as I cre­ate the posts, I will come back here and mod­ify this list and cre­ate links to the spe­cific top­ics. This will then become an index of sorts to the related content.]