I learned a great way to create questions that the students can't wait to answer!
https://getkahoot.com/
An interactive way for students to answer questions by using their phone. The teacher creates questions, or a survey and the students answer via cell phone. The quicker they answer, the more points they get so they get excited about answering the questions.
I feel like we are at a very interesting time in terms of teaching. We have all these crazy new tools, like this one, which give us a chance to shake things up. Even better, no single company (T.I., Casio, Pearson, SmartBoard or even Google) has the power to bully a school into building a classroom around a single technology offering (though, to be honest, there have been attempts.)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, something tells me that, in three years, we might be looking back on the 2013-2015 timeframe as this crazy wide open era in which a teacher could download the latest app -- or tell students to visit some web page -- and try something totally risky like this on the classroom SmartBoard.
Not to be pessimistic, but I can see a lot of these offerings falling by the wayside in the next five years as the investment money dries up and education players like Pearson try to snap up all the "minnows" and force schools into licensing arrangements similar to what you see in the corporate world. Either that or Google, because of its more open approach to data, falls into political disfavor for sloppily mishandling student data or some such.
Long story short, it feels like a time to enjoy fun classroom hacks like this while they last!