Kami Review

Kami is an amazing life-saver of an application! Given the recent obstacles teaching in the hybrid model, Kami offers teachers and students incredible flexibility and the ease of working on digital worksheets. Considering the application's relevance, customization, usability, and engagement, I give this application an overall score of 4. Kami's relevance for teaching and learning is perhaps its strongest aspect in that it was created as a digital worksheet and serves exactly as so, allowing teachers and students to mark up as they wish, using various digital tools that mimic the use of a pencil, marker, highlighter, etc. It is even compatible with Google Classroom! Teachers can customize and convert documents easily to be used on Kami in PDF format, making theoretically any document editable for students. Kami also enables the teacher or student to save work with "flattened" annotations, which allows for new versions of the original document to be shared with users in a way that does not permit the next user to re-edit the original, which is tremendously helpful for teachers wishing to add annotations to scaffold for or assist their students on assignments. Usability proves to be extremely high, where students can easily access and use the application as necessary after learning the tools for in a few quick days. Therefore, I rate Kami a 4 in all previous categories of Relevance, Customization, and Usability. While engagement is typically cued by a teacher's command to complete a task using Kami, students breeze through it with ease and accept it as a normal part of their school day, thus I rate it a 3 in Engagement. As for Feedback, it is possible that Kami could offer some method of automatic feedback but does not at the current time. However, it does allow for teachers to be able to add comments to student work manually. As such, it scores low in this category with a 1 for automatic feedback but allows for manual feedback which brings it back to a 3. Other criteria such as Thinking Skills and Sharing do not quite apply with this type of application, which is not meant to be used as a learning application, but rather a tool for learning. If I were to be required to rate Kami based on these 2 criteria, I would have to give it a 1 in each area. However, I do not place heavy weight on these considering the objective of the application and how it is meant to be used. Consequently, Kami achieves an overall rating of 4 for its usefulness, practicality, and ease.