On the Edge of their Seats: Using polls, backchannels, and games in student response systems to create durable student engagement

Last month I delivered a presentation at Educator Day 2014 for the Diocese of Phoenix Catholic schools.  I wanted to convey that with so many student response systems available for free, teachers always have a way to give students a voice during each and every lesson.  The presentation below, "On the Edge of their Seats: Using polls, backchannels, and games in student response systems to create durable student engagement," provides case uses for the following edtech tools:

  1. PollEverywhere
  2. TodaysMeet
  3. Socrative
  4. Kahoot!

UPDATE: These tools change frequently. Since this presentation, PollEverywhere, for example, has added a "discourse" feature that allows students to see each other's free responses and "up" or "down" vote them (like on Reddit).

Remind me when the mail’s delivered

One of my favorite pastimes as an edtech enthusiast is to take commercial technologies that were not designed for school and adapt them for educational purposes. We’ve all done it: Tweeted out an assignment update; organized a school club via a Facebook page; asked a warmup question through PollEverywhere; recorded a student-written, spoken-poem through GarageBand.  There’s a little rush I get from pushing a technology in a direction other than that for which it was intended, marketed, deployed.

Recently, I’ve found myself going the other way: thinking about how certain edtech apps could be used outside of education.  Are there commercial or civic applications for technologies we use to inspire creative learning?

Given my satisfaction with Remind the last couple years (see my 500 Texts Later blog post), I was struck recently when my father mentioned the frustration he has related to the US Postal Service.  He lives in a closed community of one hundred homes whose mailboxes are clustered in a central area. Once a day, the mail carrier visits the complex and delivers the mail. During hot summer Phoenix days, my dad lamented, you never know when the mail’s been delivered until you park near the mailboxes, leave your car (and A/C) running, walk to your particular box, and open it with a sizzling key.  Is there a way to know if the mail's been delivered without getting out of the car, he wondered.  The traditional flag-up/flag-down mechanism doesn’t work with 100 boxes, so what to do...?

Have the mail carrier Remind you, I said.  The next day, we had the mail carrier download Remind, create a “class” for that community, and begin sending text alerts to neighbors who wanted a notification when the mail was delivered each day.  As in the classroom, this is an opt-in service for community members, and certainly a value-ad for the USPS, which you may agree is looking for ways to stay relevant.

With the potential of 100 text alerts simultaneously directing neighbors to their mailboxes, we now only need an app that can manage the pedestrian traffic.



PollEverywhere Icebreaker Poll Contest

PollEverywhere ran a contest last week: create the most engaging "icebreaker" poll to warm up an audience or classroom waiting for a presentation.  By entering this contest, I learned that this early student response system had more bells and whistles than I had realized prior.  Some 

  • GIFs: You can insert an animated .gif file into a poll question and scale its size (thumbnail to entire background image)
  • Images as answers: In lieu of text, you can insert an image (.jpg, .png, .gif) as a possible correct answer to a poll question
  • Fonts & Colors: You can manipulate the typeface of each poll element as well as the background color
  • Omit: You can delete elements like poll instructions
  • Clickable image: Users can touch an area of an image (map, chart, graph, table, art) as a correct answer. (See how I used clickable images in this interview I did with PollEv last month.)

I shared my two entries with my classes, and they were mildly hopeful that I had a shot at one of the prizes.  Last week I was informed that the Jaws poll I made would be featured in a list of other "ice breaker" polls, but, alas, I was not a winner, but my colleague @MrLBCP received an honorable mention for his Family Guy-inspired poll.

Entry #1: Jaws  (click for live poll)

Entry #2: Top Gun (click for live poll)

Both of these polls contain animated gifs. Click links above to see.  Do you have a go-to icebreaker poll?

Use Storify to capture a retrospective of your professional development timeline from Twitter

Today I realized that Storify could be used to represent a timeline of my professional development activities on Twitter.  Since my school requires a teacher portfolio that tracks classroom goals, teacher observations, technology implementation, student evaluations, etc., I think the addition of a timeline of the semester's PD goings-on would supplement the portfolio nicely.  By viewing the last several months of my posts on Twitter related to NoRedInk, Membean, Socrative, PollEverywhere, I can see how I've connected with other educators and developed relationships with edtech companies.

With easy account creation, Storify allows users to curate a retrospective of the Web, and I simply entered my @MrJohnDamaso Twitter handle and was presented with a stream of my Tweets and Retweets. I loaded a few hundred of them and captured them as a Storify that I can easily insert into my portfolio, Tweet out, or include here.