Wednesday, March 27, 2013

7 free ways to capture student responses without costly clickers

Most educators are familiar with student response systems (SRS) a.k.a. clickers. Common brands are eInstruction, Sentio, TurningPoint, Activote. Those who use the systems know they run about $2,500 - $4,000 (depending on various options selected) for a class set and allow educators to track student learning, engage an entire class as they collect real-time responses from students, and enable them to quickly assess understanding and achievement. While these are valuable instructional outcomes, clickers are costly and the distribution, collection, and maintenance of devices is rather cumbersome. In many cases using them requires training to figure out how to upload the software, input questions, maneuver from one question to the next and share answers.

Here’s the thing. You don’t spend money and professional development time to purchase clickers. You can capture student’s thoughts and ideas for free using whatever device they have whether it’s a dumb phone, tablet, or  laptop.  

Here are seven free resources you can use to get started.

The Answer Pad (www.TheAnswerPad.com)
The Answer Pad is a free, enhanced student response system, together with a grading tool for assessments for BYOD. Go Interactive, has 6 different response types, an awesome draw feature. It engages reluctant students, encouraging them to show what they know, enabling teachers to immediately gauge understanding in the classroom. The Answer Pad can then score paper quizzes, with multiple question types, cutting grading time significantly.

Poll Everywhere provides students with a simple method to share their ideas right from a phone, laptop, or tablet. The teacher can set up various free text polls to gather information from students and keep the responses private or make them public. Educators can view student responses in their web browser or download them as a spreadsheet.

Loca Moda allows students to submit a text message to an online bulletin board. The Loca Moda board is animated and students love the fake names it assigns to their posts. This easy-to-use tool enables your students to use the same technology that is viewed by thousands at large-scale events such as concerts, gallery openings, fundraisers, inauguration events, and political conventions. It is also used extensively in digital signage networks ranging from huge jumbotrons in places like Times Square to thousands of screens in cafes, entertainment centers and even churches.

Classpager (www.classpager.com)
Engage students with polls, exit tickets, event reminders, and more using ClassPager.  Classpager allows students to use their own devices (phones, tablets, laptops, or other computers) to respond to questions or surveys that the teachers designs with simple text messaging.  Questions can be both open response and multiple choice.

Twitter (www.Twitter.com)
Twitter is a great tool for sharing, discovering, and connecting with others who care about the same ideas and information. You can use Twitter right on your phone without downloading any software, and even with just one teacher cell phone per class, contributions can be made and modeled anywhere, anytime. Twitter has become such a popular tool because it asks one question: "What's happening?" Answers must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.
Like texting, the beauty of Twitter is that its core technology is a device agnostic system that lets the masses participate.  Because of this, with just a cell phone in hand, Twitter makes it easy for folks to stay connected...even if all they have at their fingertips is sms. For example, anyone (in the US) can receive Tweets on their phone even if they haven’t signed up for Twitter. This is a simple way for people to get information they care about in real-time. For example, let’s say you want to get Tweets from me just text ‘follow InnovativeEdu’ to 40404.

Cel.ly (http://cel.ly)
Cel.ly is primarily a free group texting service. Group texting saves time, improves communication, provides documentation of texts, and sets the stage for easily using many other cell phone tools. The Cells referred to in Cel.ly are instant mobile networks. With Cel.ly, you can have open group chat, one-way alerting, or a hybrid where curators can approve messages.

Cel.ly also provides security and privacy as phone numbers are never exposed and there are controls. Cell curators filter messages before they are sent to the group. This keeps discussion on-topic and reduces abuse, impersonation, and cyberbullying. An @me feature lends itself to note taking. Cel.ly even has a built-in polling feature complete with the tabulation of results.

Socrative is a smart student response system that empowers teachers by engaging their classrooms with a series of educational exercises and games. The apps are super simple and take seconds to login. Socrative runs on tablets, smartphones, and laptops.
Enhancing learning with student response

Ideas to get started
You can use the tools mentioned here to enhance learning in many ways.  Here are some ideas to get started.
  1. Set up a homework help poll for a particular assignment or unit of study. Students can simply text in the questions when they have them. This could set the stage beautifully for the next day's lesson enabling the teacher to differentiate instruction based on student need.
  2. Have students respond to a discussion topic. The teacher shares the topic and students text in their answers to be viewed publicly or privately by the teacher.
  3. Want a quick check for understanding? Poll your students. Want them to vote on a favorite character in a book? Poll your students. Collecting data on a science experiment? Poll your students.

These seven tools provide educators with the ability to know what students are thinking at anytime and are also great pre and post assessment resources.

7 comments:

  1. Also, even a simple Google form can be used to gather student input. It generates a spreadsheet, and automatic graphs of responses as well. I've seen them effectively used in middle and high school classes. They do require some advance planning, though.

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  2. A review of literature from a variety of disciplines (Caldwell, 2007; Fies & Marshall, 2006; Judson & Sawada, 2002; Simpson & Oliver, 2007; Stowell & Nelson, 2007) reveals that a Classroom Response System creates a more dynamic to capture student responses, interactive classroom experience which can be enjoyable and fun for both the instructor and students. These studies document an increase in attendance, participation, and learning.

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  3. I really like this post and recommended it on Stumbleupon. I really wish you'd get a Stumbleupon button because this is good stuff.

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  4. My favorite is Socrative. Unlike polleverywhere and the like, Socrative allows teachers to receive results in real-time and create a spreadsheet of the results. In the age of documentation and evidence this vital. Also, there is an app for Socrative on smart phones so students can use it to take the test and teachers can administer it that way. Also there is a time limit option as well as a unlimited time option so students can finish the test at their leisure. There is also a feature that allows students to retake the test as many times as they like, while it records their progress for the teacher. I can't tell you what this does to boost critical thinking skills and motivation. Most students think, I only have one chance to prove that I know the material, and this helps calm those fears. I would offer using Google Drive the same way for assessments such as writing or even other PBL assessments. There they can write at length and it is still recorded via spreadsheet.

    Another good way to capture student behavior (I know it isn't responses but...) is a program called Class Dojo. Here you can record their good and bad behaviors, daily or weekly, and it creates a pie graph to show the student, teacher and parent what behaviors are most prevalent in class. www.classdojo.com Great for elementary and middle school teachers. Check out our blog: http://homegrown-education.blogspot.com/

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  5. Twitter is a brilliant tool in the classroom - have done a bit of research and experimenting with various year groups: "Using Twitter in the MFL classroom" http://www.thwlanguages.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/twitter-in-mfl-classroom-ililc-2013.html

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  6. I'm a lecturer at Curtin University and another interesting and engaging way to get students thinking for themselves, but working together as a group is with a tool called GroupMap. (www.groupmap.com) or (www.facebook.com/groupmap) There's a free and a paid version but really good to trial out.

    It takes polling to the next level by allowing free from answers from the students to the question you pose, either as a mindmap or a 2D chart (for things like perceptual maps, ranking and so forth) There's a youtube video here for example. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lqG8U9dcww

    It's also real time, with instant resluts and works on laptops, tablets and ipads with chrome or safari.

    Super easy set up so you can create a map on the fly and the inline instructions guide students through the use of it in a game like fashion.

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  7. There is https://www.plickers.com too. You don't even need your students to have a phone.

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