Polls can be used to create a data-driven classroom. Data takes many forms and has many uses in education, but this particular data gathering method can give you data tailored to you or data tailored to individual courses. Students are our customers, and when we continually gauge our customers’ satisfaction and make adjustments, we get valuable data and our customers see how important they are to us.
Data from polls can show whether students in your class feel like they are ‘getting it,’ which makes polling a formative assessment tool. It can also show what students think about the tools they are using, which can drive future course revisions. Polling can even show you how students are feeling about your performance: are you answering email fast enough, are you available enough, and are you getting to the grading fast enough? Polling can also show you how students are feeling about their own performance -asking the question can help teach students a valuable lesson in responsibility as their answers give them ownership of their outcomes.
This tutorial shows how teachers can add polls to blackboard courses. Remember, a poll can be used in an announcement or after a mini-lesson, direct instruction, or assessment to get feedback… it can be used anywhere! To get data about a course rather than an individual teacher, these polls could be added during course development and reset every semester from a central polldaddy site. I’ll go over that in a future broadcast.
This presentation shows polls at the development side of data gathering rather than the teaching side. This presentation will show NCVPS teachers how to add polls to course shells so that the polls can give us data about the course. The tutorial also shows how to use a central polldaddy account to create the polls so that we can easily reset them every semester! It also talks about a central gmail email account teachers can use for web 2.0 services that might need to be shared among an entire department or program. For example, when the English Department uses sharedcopy, everyone uses the same account with the username ‘Professor.’ In this way, there will always be a team of people with editorial access to the tools we develop as a program!
Screentoaster is a great way for Tecknowledgeable Teachers to reach students and peers for a number of purposes. It can allow us to create tutorials to show our fellow teachers how to go about doing things, and it can create direct instruction presentations for ‘canned’ lectures and skills lessons. What’s nice about the former is that fellow teachers can see exactly how things work and look on the screen, and what’s nice about the latter is that students can repeat as necessary until they ‘get it.’ To do a screentoaster tutorial on ‘How to do a Screentoaster tutorial’ posed a couple of challenges logistically, but I think the one below is going to be helpful. I couldn’t actually record myself recording, but I think you get the idea. Just click the play button below to play the tutorial, and look for the icon in the bottom right that looks like a target to go full screen. Make sure your audio is turned on so you can hear the instructions, and enjoy!
Shu
