Researches have proved that introducing audience response system into classroom activities can bring further advantages to learning. Enlightenment of traditional teaching can be achieved by engaging students with the concepts and increasing the
participation in interaction. This can be done by a method called “Polling”. Polling facilitates the creation of an interactive learning environment.
It is used in terms of a learning objective because it allows self evaluation by students. It’s a powerful tool for teachers to check what students are observing, how many students have understood the concept, what topics they are expecting you to cover and much more. Polling helps students to express their views independently and instantly. The use of technology in classroom
to enhance students’ learning is a common and effective idea nowadays. Educational institutions are trying to implement many more such technological approaches in the classrooms. There are many technological resources that help you to conduct polls. Let’s look at some tools and apps to create classroom polls.
Teacher Clicker – Socrative:
Teacher Clicker – Socrative engages the entire classroom with educational exercises and games while capturing student results in real-time. Interact with the data to further student understanding in a moment, and review the reports to prepare for future classes. If students have their own devices, it becomes even more effective to use this app in classrooms.
Features:
Short Answer Questions: Ask an open-ended question. Students respond and all their answers populate your screen for projection. Then ask students to vote for their favorites and watch the results come in.
Quick Quiz: A teacher paced or student paced activity with multiple choice and/or short answer questions. Results can be viewed question by question and exported to a report that is automatically aggregated and graded.
Create a Quiz: Design your own Quick Quizzes with the built-in feature or import them with Excel template. Share with your community!
Space Race: Teams of students answer multiple choice questions in this fast-paced rocket race game. First team to get their rocket across the screen wins! You’ll get a graded report!
Exit Tickets: Get a quick, paper-free pulse-check at the end of class. All answers are aggregated into a report!
Multiple Choice: Ask an MC question, and see student responses on the projection screen as a bar chart.
It’s a free app compatible with iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. It requires iOS 4.3 or later.
SMILE:
SMILE, is an interactive new way of engaging students with technology that’s easily accessible to everyone. SMILE stands for Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment. It has been specifically designed for the classroom environment. SMILE turns a traditional classroom into a highly interactive learning environment by engaging students in critical reasoning and problem-solving while enabling them to generate, share, and evaluate multimedia-rich inquiries. Students can create their own inquiries or homework items based on their learning for the day. For example, students can freely take a photo of a diagram or any other object from their own textbooks or any phenomena discovered in their school garden or lab and create a homework item. It’s like flipping an examination system, students create the questions with their own research. They can incorporate various images by taking photos, and other mobile media can as well be incorporated. Students like this concept a lot and they find it very interesting to involve themselves in interaction. Currently, this tool is available to Stanford University School of Education personnel. You may refer their website for future availabilities.
ClipChoose:
ClipChoose is a quick and easy way for you to compose video polls.
Usage:
Creating your own poll – go to ClipChoose website, register for your account and click on “Create” link. You can type a question, add categories and enter up to 12 video URLs. The question will be displayed along with its videos displayed under it. It helps teachers to find what type of information a student needs. For example, You can ask a question “Which browser do you prefer – Google Chrome or Internet Explorer?”, you can upload the promotional videos of those two browsers and observe what students prefer. They will first watch the videos and then vote for the one they like. Meanwhile, you can see students learn about those browsers by watching videos, analyze them and pick up the one they find best.
Similarly, you can update a question related to an educational technology and have students’ opinions on it. You’ll find many relevant videos on YouTube, so you can provide your students with the best concepts, compare a number of resources and assess their interest.
QuizSlides:
QuizSlides is an innovative web-based platform for creating multiple-choice online quizzes and exams using PowerPoint or PDF files. These quizzes can be used by students as learning checks. QuizSlides; In a PowerPoint presentation,each slide in the middle of a presentation has a question with it’s four possible answers on it, you can also include tables, images and equations wherever required. The first and last slides don’t have questions on them. The first slide shows the title of the quiz or exam and the last slide concludes the presentation. This presentation is saved as a ppt or pdf file. The file is then uploaded to QuizSlides website, where you can choose to create either a quiz or an exam. You’re also asked to identify the correct answers for each of the slides. The test format is “answer until correct”; this means the users can select the options repeatedly until they get the right answer, this makes them ideal for self assessment.
Quia:
Quia
(pronounced key-ah), is the short for Quintessential Instructional Archive. Quia provides a wide variety of tools, including:
- Templates for creating 16 types of online activities using your own content.
- A complete online testing system with automatic grading, immediate feedback, and detailed reporting.
- Online surveys for gathering student and teacher feedback.
- A class Web page creator to share Quia activities and class announcements with students and parents.
- Access to millions of shared activities and quizzes in over 300 categories.
All of these are the tools and apps for creating polls and quizzes. Use these resources to engage students in a great interactive learning environment. Do you know more resources like these? Please share with us in the comment box.
You can also share your practices related to use of such tools in classroom with us.
