Organizing and evaluating resources and tools for active learning approaches

Innovative teaching and learning practices towards active approaches, require digital tools for creating digital artifacts (such as infographics, mental maps, timelines), for improving the interaction between teachers/students and organizing work groups, for aggregating documents and sources. Although the Web proposes a large offer of applications useful for these aims, there is a lack of knowledge about their existence, their functions and their potential in educational settings. In this paper, we present AppInventory, a visual catalog of 271 applications, organized in a purpose-based taxonomy; starting from a general view that groups the applications in three main macro-categories, users can apply different zooming levels for visualizing the details of the macro-categories, then of the categories, applications, and finally the detailed cards of applications . Users can explore the catalog following personal contextual paths, supported by zz-structures, assigning ratings for each visited application and leaving comments and suggestions.