Poll Everywhere - mostly free surveys!

I originally saw the program Poll Everywhere on a different blog that discussed technology in school libraries, so I can’t take all of the credit. But it seems like such a fun idea to engage students in classroom discussion. Almost all of Southwestern’s students carry cell phones to class, right? So why not use a poll to ask students questions about projects, social issues or classroom topics? Students can respond by using their cell phones to text their vote or by voting online. When you include the polls in presentations or websites, the results will update in real time.

Of course, this program is only free to an extent. If you only want to poll 30 or fewer people, the program is free, but if your audience is larger, there is a monthly subscription cost. For most class sizes, a free subscription would probably be all that was needed.

This seems like it would also be a great way to get feedback and opinions from people in class who may not be as outspoken as others. Or in classes that talk about current events, students may feel concerned about voicing unpopular opinions. For example, some students may feel more comfortable expressing their opinions about controversial topics (abortion, international politics) anonymously.

And classrooms are certainly not the only place where this tool could be used – I’m thinking of creating a poll on library usage!

Create Great Puzzles

For the past few months, I’ve been including word search puzzles in the student newspaper, The Southwestern Eagle. Just one of the many reasons that I have for doing this is the fact that they are so easy to make! The site http://www.blogger.com/www.puzzle-maker.com/ makes it easy for me to supply a list of words and generate a puzzle that includes them all.

Now, as far as using word search puzzles for actual school assignments, I don’t really see the point. But the site also creates crossword puzzles that could be lots of fun. For example, instructors may want to compile lists of review questions (which most probably do already) then have this program make a crossword puzzle. Each clue could be a review question and the answers would be the puzzle solutions. This is just one idea that I happened to think of, I'm sure there are many other ways that teachers could very easily incorporate this into their curriculum.

This may not do anything to actually improve the work, but it may help make it more fun!