(All photos from www.polleverwhere.com)
My current project is focused on student engagement and the goal is to increase student immersion and significantly develop student-generated content. A strong Web 2.0 tool to help these outcomes is Polleverywhere.com.
Any educator can go to the Polleverywhere.com site and start a poll without having to sign up and give out the names of their children AND their social security number. There is a simple free account that is powerful, yet limited to 30 students that can respond for each question. Hey, thirty and Free is great for the average classroom of America in this economy. So the beauty of this tool is that an educator can ask open ended questions, multiple choice, true/false, numeric answers, etc… and the students only need to have a cell phone or computer to respond. All of my college students had cell phones each time I have used this tool.
The day I implemented this in class with my first question, I instantly had 100% of the class scurrying for their cell phones to get involved. I could see the look in students’ eyes thinking, “Wow, a teacher that lets me used my banned cell phone during class time. This teacher is crazy – hey, actually cool… Whoa, they tricked me into answering in class! (tee hee, snicker snicker)” – because they liked it! Technology in the classroom will save us!
Every college student in my room became engaged because they had a chance to be anonymous and provide input to the content of the class. Their answers were like “Gold” to me. Every answer was great, even though some were incorrect. I just said, “This is an enthusiastic answer, yet it could be improved a bit by changing the letters, Y. E. S. into N. O. to be a bit closer to the correct answer,” and the students chuckled. I rarely asked yes/no questions with this tool. That was mundane to students. I instantly found out that they wanted to really use their brains; they wanted to offer intellectual input like, ‘what a good essay question would be for today’s subject?’ Wow, the students wrote the test questions. That gets 100% student engagement – especially when I told them, they truly, for real, were writing the exam!
There were a couple questions that I required students to add their name in the text message they sent to the poll. Most answers were anonymous and students remained professional every session I’ve used this tool. That may be because respect exudes from my room. It is the most important thing I convey in my teaching and I never say it out loud. It just happens. That may be a tough issue for some teachers though. If that wasn’t the case, students could anonymously enter negative comments and ruin the moment. A teacher always has the ability to pre-screen the answers before projecting them.
I am extremely impressed by Polleverywhere.com and am now considering submitting a budget request to upgrade to allow the higher answer quantity for my classes. Students often want to input two or three comments, answers, or questions for a single poll proposition. Hey, I want to get those student brains thinking and let them take over my class with no limitations! Polleverywhere.com is one way to do that, but please don’t tell anyone else, because these Web 2.0 tools are really supposed to be a highly kept secret! Right?
Polleverywhere sounds really good. I can see how I may be able to use this for my classes to get the students more involved. I do a traditional (boring) questionnaire (poll) at the beginning of my classes and the same questionnaire (poll) at the end. I can see how this could be used instead and a little more engaging.
ReplyDeleteI also have questions of the day but as you alluded to I could give them a topic and they write the questions they are interested in and then we go from there. More engagement in the classroom, terrific!!!
Many things are possible. This free version would work great for me as I typically have only 20 students. Is there a limit on how many times you can use this tool?