February 4, 2014
Students feedback can sometimes host a treasure trove of new insights not only about their own comprehension but also about our teaching. Giving students the opportunity to share their own response on the learning taking place in the classroom is highly beneficial to them particularly in the way they position themselves vis a vis the content being taught. They also feel empowered because they know their voice does matter and therefore become more engaged and involved in the learning/teaching process.
There are a wide variety of web tools teachers can use to gather informal feedback and responses from students. I have sifted through some of these web applications and ended up with the list below. I only highlighted the ones I believe are most relevant for a classroom setting.
1- Socrative
Saocrative is one of my favourite tools for getting feedback from users. Teachers can use the different question types provided by Socrative to poll their students and garner their feedback in a variety of formats using both smartphones or computers.
Simple Meet is similar to TodaysMeet. It is an easy to use service that enables you to chat instantly with everyone from within your favourite web browser, without any account or software to install.
Mentimeter allows you to use mobile phones or tablets to vote on any question you specify. This is how it works:
- Create your question
- Let your audience vote using their mobile phones or tablets
- Show the result to your audience in real-time
PresentersWall is a web-based voting tool that allows teachers to create questions and statements in a web-interface. These questions can be shown on-screen during class and students can answer these questions with their own smartphone or tablet. All they need to do is visit a web-URL to enter the mobile app and give in their answers. Results of the voting will be visualized real-time on screen in pie charts, bar charts and tag clouds. With PresentersWall, it is also possible to have students ask their questions anonymously. In this way, even the shy students will be able to ask their questions easily!