Showing posts with label audience response. Show all posts
Showing posts with label audience response. Show all posts

Brainstorming and polling with AnswerGarden

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AnswerGarden is a very simple tool for creating short answer polls and displaying the answers as word clouds. It’s really simple and quick to use and can be used in the classroom or embedded into webpages, blogs or in online courses.

To create an AnswerGarden poll just go to http://answergarden.ch and click on the + sign at the top. Then you can either type in a topic to brainstorm or a question.



AnswerGarden poll responses are limited to either 20 or 40 characters so be sure that the type of question you use doesn’t require a long complex answer. AnswerGarden works best when only a single word answer is required.

Once you have added your topic or question you can just click enter and your poll will be ready. Then just share the URL with the recipients.

You can refine your poll and add some security to it if you wish.
  • There are a number of modes you can choose for your poll.
  • You can allow different users to repeat the same answer, in which case the repeated word will appear larger depending on the number of people who enter the word, or you can allow each word to be entered only one time.
  • You can set the poll to be moderated so that words only appear once you approve them.
  • You can add a password for the poll and add your email address to get an admin link for the poll.
  • You can lock the poll so that nobody can add to it, but this would usually be done once the poll is complete.

Once the poll has been launched there are a number of other nice features including an automatically generated QR code to make the poll easy to access for students on mobile phones.


 You can also share the poll quite easily through a range of social media or get an embed code to add it to a webpage or blog. You can even geo broadcast the poll through your local network so that anyone can discover it on their mobile phone or laptop.


Once your students have completed the poll there are a number of export options including export to Wordle, Tagxedo which allow you to customise the word cloud and save or edit the results. You can also send it to Twitter or save it as a PNG.

AnswerGarden in the classroom
  • You can set a topic and get students to brainstorm vocabulary connected with that topic. Once all the words have been added you can ask students to peer teach any they don’t know in pairs or small groups or research the words in an online dictionary.
  • As a warmer you could get students to enter all the verbs, nouns or adjectives they know that start with a particular letter. You could even create two or three AnswerGardens with the same task and give them to different groups and see which group produces the most examples.
  • You could do a variation of the above game by getting students to brainstorm nouns that have specific qualities. For example, students could add anything they can think of that has feet, or anything that can fly, or anything that is green.
  • You could start with a route word and ask your students to enter or collect words that collocate with it. This doesn’t have to be done in one lesson but students could use a number of these AnswerGardens to collect collocations. They could do a similar thing with phrasal verbs using either a verb or a preposition in the question.
  • You could use AnswerGarden to get your students to create anagrams from a route word. Again you could have a different poll for each grup and make this competitive.
  • You could use an AnswerGarden to find out more about your students by getting them to enter things or people that they like or don’t like, such as favourite sports or actors.
  • You could find out how students feel about something by getting them to enter adjectives to express their feelings about anything from politics to action research on specific classroom techniques you use. Or they could just enter adjectives to describe how they are feeling. This is a good way to take the temperature of the room.
  • You could use AnswerGarden to get students to decide between two or three options. They just type in the one they want and the most popular one will appear as the biggest word.
Because AnswerGarden is so simple and quick to use and doesn’t require registration it would be great to get students using it to create their own small research questionnaires. They could then share these within the class or through their social media networks and then present the responses in class.

I hope you enjoy using AnswerGarden with your students. Please post any additional ideas or links to examples you have created in the comments.

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Nik Peachey
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Managing the digital classroom - Using a backchannel

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In my first post in this series - Getting students' attention - I mentioned the use of backchannels. This post should give you more information about the use of backchannels within the classroom.

If you are working in a classroom where your students have internet connected devices, either through wifi or their mobile phone, using a backchannel can have a transformative impact on the way you can use technology with your students.

“Backchannel is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside the primary group activity or live spoken remarks.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backchannel


Most backchannels are text based and many-to-many, meaning that anyone can type in a message and it is seen by everyone who has access to the chatroom.



Back channels are particularly useful if you are working in a face to face environment where all or pairs/groups of students are working at a computer or if you are delivering live online classes using some form or web conferencing or webinar platform.

Backchannels help to solve a number of common classroom problems

Distraction
  • I often describe a backchannel as the communication that happens between your students in the classroom every time to turn your back on them. The advantage of using a backchannel tool is that you can capture the intercommunication, be part of it and make it a constructive rather than a distracting part of the class.
Democratisation of learning
  • Backchannels democratise the classroom or lecture room, at least for periods of time, and enable everyone to contribute what they know about the point or topic being discussed.
Giving students links to online resources
  • If you want students to investigate a website, do an online task, watch a video or complete a digital worksheet, you simply use the back channel, paste in the link and they can access the materials simply by clicking the link and opening it in a new tab. This saves a lot of time and gets students directly to the sites you want them to access rather than leaving them struggling to write down long URLs and type them into the browser address bar.
Getting all students to respond to questions
  • You can type in questions and get students to respond through the backchannel. Using this method all students are able to participate and respond to questions rather than the first one to put up their hand. This also gives less outspoken students the opportunity to respond.
Setting and reinforcing clear task
  • When you set tasks for students to do you can back them up by also typing your instructions into the backchannel. This gives them something to refer back to and also helps to reinforce your verbal instructions. This can reduce wasted time going round the class helping weaker students get on task.
Brainstorming
  • You can get students brainstorming ideas, suggestions, vocabulary, opinions or anything else through the back channel. This way everyone's contribution can be collected, shared and acknowledged.
Enabling students to share knowledge
  • Students get share what they know about any topic or ask a question at any point during lesson, even when you are presenting, without disrupting the flow of the class.
Socialisation with students
  • Students can socialise and you can socialise with students within the back channel. Just spending a few minutes at the start of the lesson asking questions and finding out what students are up to can really help to engage with your students.
Developing written fluency
  • Interacting with students in a chatroom also gives students an opportunity to develop their written fluency through genuine communication.
Saving notes from the class
  • The script from a backchannel can be saved and downloaded, so this is a great form of collaborative note taking. At the end of the class each student can edit their own version of the text to ensure they keep the parts that they feel are relevant.

Some problems with back channels

Safety
  • As always we should take our students' online safety very seriously  when using any form of computer mediated communication that allows students or others to communicate with our students.  Some back channel tools require registration and this adds a greater element of security to the platform as users are more traceable, though student registration can add an extra layer of time management and friction to the setup process.
  • If you decide to use a back channel that doesn't require registration then it's better to make sure you create a new one each lesson and only leave it live for only a short time.
Behaviour
  • When you first start to use a back channel you may have some initial behaviour problems, especially with younger less mature students. Try to stay level headed when you deal with this. As the use of the back channel becomes more common place your students will get used to using it in a more responsible way, especially if they realise their comments can be traced back to them.

Class size
  • If you have really large classes and lots of students are contributing comments it may get hard to keep up with all the interaction. Having a more complex backchannel tool like Backchannel Chat can help you to manage this more effectively.
Chaos
  • Reading back through the text from a back channel can seem like reading through chaos to someone who wasn’t there at the time. Backchannel records will need to be edited to be useful, but  this is a good review activity for students.

Backchannel tools

Here are a number of tools you can use to create a backchannel in your classroom.
  
TodaysMeet: https://todaysmeet.com/
TodaysMeet is one of the simplest and easiest to use tools, and also one that’s free and very reliable. It doesn’t require registration by you or the students so it’s really quick to set up and get students into, but if you want that extra security you can register for a free account, which will also enable you to save your chat transcripts.
You can enter an example room here: https://todaysmeet.com/exampleroom1

Backchannel Chat: http://www.backchannelchat.com/
Backchannel Chat is a bit more sophisticated and enables students to choose avatars for the chat and more importantly it enables you the teacher to pin a question or message to the top of the chatroom stream so that it doesn’t disappear as students respond. There is both a free version (which is limited to 30 students) as well as paid versions which have larger limits and other features like file adding attachments and personalising avatars with students’ own picture.

You can enter an example room here: http://backchannelchat.com/chat/7x82l

Chatzy: http://www.chatzy.com/
Chatzy offers two options; A quick chat room which you can set up quite quickly and simply (more like TodaysMeet, or a more complex virtual classroom which you can configure to allow students to add various types of online media too, such as images and videos.



You can enter an example room here: http://us21.chatzy.com/55961595316533

Find more tools to use in the digitally connected classroom by downloading my ebook - Digital Tools for Teachers

Check it out

I hope you find backchannels useful with your students and that they help you to integrate technology into your classroom in a more meaningful way.

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Nik Peachey
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Making lectures and lessons more interactive with mQlicker

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As the traditional lecture has come increasingly under fire for being completely out of touch with modern teaching and learning methods, there has been a move by many teachers, conference presenters and lecturers to make their teaching techniques more modern and interactive. One of the key technologies for enabling this has been a range of audience response systems that provide real time responses to polls, questions and surveys while the speakers is actually presenting.

It’s great that many teachers are taking this step, but some of these response systems like mQlicker can deliver much more than a simple audience response, in fact you can use them to initiate debates, brainstorm ideas or even develop complete units of elearning which can help you to ‘flip’ your classroom and create motivating blended learning materials which encourage and keep track of student engagement.

mQlicker has a number of ways of encouraging interaction and displaying results. To see a live demo of how mQlicker look at: http://www.mqlicker.com/demo.html

Be sure to tab through the different questions types, enter data and use the settings tab to change the way the data displays. I particularly like the word cloud type data display for text and numerical entries.


To set up your mQlicker interactions you need to register and log in on the mQlicker site. This is free to do.

Once you have done this you see the admin user interface. This is much simpler to use than it looks at first glance and the initial field shows you the 6 step instructions for how to create your poll or questionnaire.

Once you have created your questionnaire and launched it, participants just need to go to: https://respond.cc/ enter a numerical code and then input their response.

Here are 3 short video tutorial which show you how to do that.

How to create an mQlicker questionnaire 1



How to create an mQlicker questionnaire 2

How to create an mQlicker questionnaire 3



Why I like mQlicker
  • For a start mQlicker is cross platform compatible so as well as working an app on all the major mobile platforms it will also run in the browser on both mobile and desktop.
  • It has a range of ways of displaying participants responses which you can choose from. I particularly like the one which shows responses to text input as a word cloud.
  • I really like that you only need to set up one fixed URL https://respond.cc/ for responses and that respondents just enter a short digital code. This makes it pretty simple to get people to the right place at an event and they don’t have complex URLs to copy down or registration codes to handle.
  • mQlicker is pretty simple and straight forward just to get started with, but it also comes with a complete manual http://resources.mqlicker.com/doc/manual.pdf that you can download to start digging into the more complex capabilities.
  • You can embed mQlicker chart results into a presentation (PPT) and make it dynamic so that your presentation slide updates automatically when people vote.
  • It’s easy to reuse questions or questionnaires with multiple classes as it collects questions together in a question bank.
  • There are premium services if you want something that looks customized for your company or event.
Some tips for getting the best from audience response
  • Don’t limit participation to the room. Why not send out surveys and polls for response through social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook or through a back channel chatroom, then you can get a much wider variety of opinion and get the people in the room to respond to that.
  • You can use the tool to brainstorm, especially with the word cloud data display. This would be great for brainstorming vocabulary based around topics, or words which collocate with ... etc.
  • You can set up before and after votes for in class discussions, to see how many people can be persuaded to change their minds.
  • You can create complete flipped interactive learning, by creating questionnaires with a video embedded into a slide at the beginning and then a variety of questions to get students exploring the video content. Then when you come to class students are prepared and you have some response data to get them working with and thinking and talking about in class. Using videos for flipped learning in this way when you are tracking the responses,  puts more pressure on students to actually do the work and watch the video as they know their responses are being tracked by the teacher.
  • You can create questions based around images, so be sure to take advantage of this feature to help stimulate response from the students.
  • You can allow students / participants to be anonymous, so this is a great tool for doing action research and to collect genuinely honest feedback on your teaching methods or content.
  • You can use it to make your classroom more democratic, by setting up votes to find out which parts of the book or course students most want to study or what kinds of activities they want to do next.
  • It’s great that mQlicker can enable open text input, so make the most of this feature. Participants are often frustrated wit questionnaires or polls that don’t really provide the answers that they want to give. Creating open text questions gives the respondent much more ability to express what they feel. This can though be more difficult for you to analyze statistically
  • And last but not least you can use it for assessment and set micro tests as you class progresses. This can assure you that participants are following and understanding your message.

mQlicker is a great free tool for making your classroom, lecture or conference presentation more interactive. It would be great to see more tools like this being used at conferences and in classrooms, but of course you do need to make sure that your venue or classroom has good connectivity and get people into the habit of coming along ready with devices to participate, but as mobile and tablet penetration grows in the education sector and educational authorities realize that we have to stop banning these devices from classrooms and start exploiting them more fully.

I hope you find mQlicker useful

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Nik Peachey
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