Thing 29: Student Response Tools
As I was reading different descriptions for these applications I realized I needed to focus on a couple. I liked some of the ideas they had but some were specific to devices which narrows the playing field.
TodaysMeet I signed up to use hopefully use this for my students. I was confused when I signed up for it. It was supposed to be easy to sign up and easy for students to join fast and start writing about what is happening beyond the interaction in the classroom. I found it to be distracting to myself so I didn’t try it out on students. I actually had my account closed. Perhaps when there is extra time (sarcasm) it could be taught to the students but there’s too much going on the web site. It does have features like instant feedback to students and reading student responses after class. So for me TodaysMeet didn’t work the way I wanted it.
The next thing I did was to try Padlet because the one Polly did at the beginning of the year was great. I like the idea just to do a quick post. Padlet does come with a price. The educator edition (backpack) is cheap and has a user access and management control. It also has more privacy which is important to my students. And it monitor activities school wide for the students that like to wander off course. I am just getting frustrated with it. Do I send each person an individual email or can I send links to others as a group. I am working on that now. I think I got it. I had the problem of it wanted to send from Outlook and not from my Google account. We will see if this works tomorrow.
Well I did get many responses from my faculty asking me what was I thinking. The program showed up like this on peoples email this morning: I am giving this up for now and when I have time I will go back to it. I just cannot get people to just have it automatically to work on. I have added people, tried different security levels and I am so frustrated at this point it will have to learn it another day.
Google Forms are my friends. I have sent out questions about what my classes want to learn about during our library time. I ask multiple choice, paragraph, check boxes, list and scale questions. It comes back to me in an Excel style spread sheet. It is by far the easiest way to have students respond to whatever you need from them. Their answers or comments can also be anonymous. So I will stick to Google for now and in the future hope to explore Padlet again,
neednewname 