GREAT advice here from Mr. Young Room 216 in Alpine District. Keep being awesome Mr. Young!
Apr 212014
Nov 132013
via mentimeter.com, originally published May 12, 2012 – Update!
Mentimeter is another option for educators as an alternative to purchasing expensive student response systems or ‘clicker’ sets for their classrooms.
Mentimeter is much more simple than Poll Everywhere or Socrative, but I don’t see where you can do anything else with your results beyond displaying them as voting is happening. It remembers your questions, but you can’t export the data to a spreadsheet for later analysis.
It’s attractive, simple to set up and simple for your audience to vote (which can be tough with the other options out there), and you don’t even need to set up an account before you use it. With simplicity comes a cost. There is no option for text-message voting – you can only vote via a web page. So, the simple feature phones that many of your students probably have will not work.
With that in mind, I like it a lot. Give it a try!
Mentimeter has been hard at work making their polling platform better and easier to use. I’m very impressed with the work they have done. I think that it’s a perfect tool for teachers and schools, in some circumstances. Its easy to start polling quickly, minimal set up is required, and they have a great new pop-up QR Code feature for each question. If you need to poll a large audience on a school budget (read FREE), there is no better option. Mentimeter allows for an unlimited number of questions and an unlimited number of responses per question with their free account.
They have added the ability to download your poll results, but it’s only available with a paid account. Also, I can’t tell if text/SMS voting is a feature. If it is, it’s only a paid account option. All voting must be done on a web-enabled device. If you need text/SMS voting, Poll Everywhere is still your best bet.
Thanks Mentimeter for providing a great tool for teachers and schools!
Nov 162012
In our smaller districts, educators are in a pilot where they are providing upper level courses to both students in their classroms and to students in other schools across the district, using a high-end video conferencing system. This first year has been a tough go for many of them, so we got them all together to share their successes and failures. We took some time showing them how to use Canvas and the benefits of doing so, as well as some strategies to be successful with working with distance-students.
After hearing from these teachers, I showed them a few tools and services that were out there that could potentially help them out. Here’s the list:
- HippoCampus– a repository of free educational resources for use in online courses from providers such as NROC, Khan Academy, and interactive science simulations from PhET
- eMedia – Accessible through the Pioneer Library, eMedia is like Netflix for Utah educators with educational videos and other resources aligned to Utah core areas and grade levels.
- Information on how to setup and use the International Keyboard options in Windows
- Socrative – Free online web-based student response system for quick quizzes that can gather student responses??from anywhere they have a computer, laptop or any web-enabled device. Once you sign up for an account, students will access your quiz questions by going to http://m.socrative.com & entering your room number.
- Poll Everywhere – Also a type of student response system, also free to educators, but allows students to respond to questions or vote with a text/SMS message from any cell phone (standard text message rates apply for responses). Poll questions can be embedded into a PowerPoint slide show as well.
- Paperless Workflow for Google Docs – I briefly talked through the basics of this, but with a little time setting this workflow up for you and your students, it really does make a paperless, distance classroom a reality. Here’s how it’s working in other schools. If you are curious, here’s the basics of getting your students set up.
Apr 202012
Below is a PDF version of the Projector Do’s and Don’ts presentation today. All of the underlined links are active and will take you to the sites and resoursorces presented, so you will hopefully not need to scribble a bunch of notes and URL’s
Mar 132012
via socrative.com
Socrative is a very intriguing new (to me, anyway) tool for formative assessment, quizzes, polls, and other classroom interactions that is easy to set up, easy for students to access, and best of all – free.
It is much more flexible and ready to use ‘on the fly’ than other services I’ve heavily endorsed before (Poll Everywhere) in that you can simply open up a multiple-choice or open-ended question for student responses without having to build the question first (Ever wanted to capture individual responses from an entire class on a UTIPS test/quiz in your classroom??)
Socrative has a great tool for building mixed multiple-choice and short answer question quizzes where the results are not displayed on the board (Teacher’s screen on projector) that can be teacher- or student-paced. The answers are collected, multiple coice questions are graded, and you can have the results downloaded in an Excel file, viewed as a Google Doc, or simply emailed to you.
You can also do True/False, quick Exit Tickets and a game called ‘Space Race’ with the system.
It’s certainly worth a look. Watch a quick video of how it works: