LIS 568 - SpacesEDU

New Tech Tool: SpacesEDU

Kaitlyn Casper

LIS 568 - Week 4: 6/16-6/22

    For this week's tech tool, I decided to try out SpacesEDU. I learned about SpacesEDU through commonsense.com, where they list a variety of tech tools that school librarians can use. SpacesEDU sounded interesting to me because it was described as a platform where students can do work and message each other. A messaging platform would be an interesting feature to have in a school library, provided that it is monitored and only used for academic chatting purposes. I was interested to see what SpacesEDU would be like!

Initial Exploration

    I initially signed up and made an educator account so I could see what SpacesEDU is like from the educator's perspective. It required me to choose a school to make an account, which is usually where I stop registering, since I don't work at a school and I wouldn't want to sign up under one that I don't work at. However, SpacesEDU let me make my own school, so I just did that and signed myself up under "Practice School." 

    During my initial exploration, I thought it looked a lot like a blog space. I know that there are lots of different blog-type applications for schools, so I wasn't too impressed yet. One thing I did find interesting is that you can post to parents as well as students, while hiding the post(s) from the view of the other group. This would be really helpful for notes sent home to parents! This feature was also available in the "Activities" tab of the site, where an educator could post different activities for students, families, or parents to do. I think this would bypass some issues that occur when kids forget to give their parents important information. It was also cool to see that the teacher could enable notifications for parents for certain scenarios, such as if an assignment is due soon and hasn't been submitted.

Student View

    Before switching to Student view, I made a sample post to see how that works and to see how it looks from the students' point of view. It was pretty easy to create a post and I saw that there were a lot of options to include other media like links, videos, audio, and more. From the student view, I was able to see what I had posted as an educator, and vice versa. As an educator, it gave me the option to toggle student or parents views, as I mentioned earlier. As a student, it seems like every post can be seen by the educator, which it good for monitoring the space. I also noticed that there is a sort of "feed" that anyone can post to and communicate through, which I liked! The students also have the option to add photos, links, or other attachments, so it would be great for sharing school work. or projects.

Is this tool useful in a school library?

    Overall, SpacesEDU seems like a useful resource for a classroom or school library! It is a bit basic, considering that blog-like sites are plentiful across the internet, but it has some interesting features like the view toggle and the post feed. I think SpacesEDU could be great for allowing students to communicate with each other and with their educator, and it would be a great place for sharing assignments and information. 

Educator view of the class's homepage (you can have multiple classes!)

Student view of the post feed.

Student view of the class's homepage.