Blog 09: Taking Polls and Learning Too!
I need to start off today’s post with a hUGE HAPPY THANKSGIVING EVERYONE!!! And to all the teachers out there who are off for these week, congratulations you made it!! To anyone who still has to work Monday and Tuesday, I am so sorry I promise you can get through it!! We all deserve the time off. I so far have watched too much TV (shout out to my favorite show, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” I strive to be Kimmy everyday!), and may or may not have joined TikTok. I caved, but it’s all animals and teachers so ya know. Comforting!
For today’s blog, I wanted to kind of a do a throwback to last weeks blog! In the blog I talked about some of the scarier parts of Canvas and mentioned some different tools I use in class! Things like Padlet and Poll Everywhere! I wanted to take today to talk about them!
Both applications are free to use, and SUPER helpful. I’m going to take a wild hunch and assume that you do warm ups when students walk into class. Last year we used to use paper warm ups that they turned in. Super quick and easy, just a STAAR question that we worked through. Now with COVID, I like to keep things paperless. Less germs, less printing (and honestly a cleaner room since everything is online). So in order to do warm ups, I like to use this website Poll Everywhere! It’s free, and simple to use! Plus it works with Canvas fairly well, so it should work well with Google Classroom.
What’s nice about Poll Everywhere is that there are multiple options of the kind of question you want to ask. Multiple choice? Got it. Word cloud?? Got it. Open ended? Got that too. It has 23 different options for questions, so you can literally do anything. What I usually do is a multiple choice, since most of our warm ups are practice STAAR Questions! That way students have opportunity to answer/practice and you can get real time feedback. I also try and do the same thing for Exit tickets! Super easy, and the students can just scan the QR code! And no, you don’t need an app to scan the QR Code if your devices are relatively up to date, the camera automatically can scan and bring you to the poll!
The Padlet is a little bit different, but it actually does have options! There are 8 different kinds of Padlets that you can create! Sometimes I use them for exit tickets since it is a little easier to see students answers all at once. Shout out to my IC Michele for showing our team some of the fun ways you can use Padlet, like there is a scatter and connect options so students can connect events, or vocab, or group like things, honestly whatever you want them to do! And just like with Poll Everywhere, you can share a link or it automatically creates a QR code for you too! Just like Poll Everywhere too it can be integrated into Canvas as well as an external URL option. So if you have virtual kids, and it’s easier to do everything through Canvas, they don’t have to leave Canvas! They can literally type or drag or do whatever your Padlet wants in the Canvas page! Same with Poll Everywhere too! Below you can see the different options you have for Padlets! Not as many as Poll Everywhere but still good!
Now, Padlet is free, but it only allows you to have like 8 or 9 Padlets at one time without a membership. But, what’s good for teachers like me who don’t want to pay, you can just clear the board each class period. I would look through answers as they typed, because you can actually see their typing real time, and then assess that way and clear before my next class came in! Or at least know when 3rd period answers stopped and 5th period answers started if I forgot to clear!
Another website that I’ve learned about (um thanks TikTok) is this whiteboard website! It’s what it sounds like, it’s a virtual whiteboard that students can draw or answer questions on! It’s called whiteboard.fi! What’s great is that as the teacher board, if you want to type something or draw something, you can have it show up on your student’s board as well! For my math teachers out there, you can also work on equations. So students can answer questions by typing, drawing, or whatever it is you want them to do. We’re on our Constitution/Government unit and just finished talking about the Bill of Rights, so I was planning on having them draw a pictorial representation of one of the rights listed (haven’t decided which one yet)! And as a teacher account, you can see all of your students board! I haven’t had a chance to use in class yet, but I plan to when we get back from Thanksgiving Break! I will update how it goes then! But I wanted to share the website so you can tinker with it if you wanted to on your break!! But also make sure to take some you time.
Now go have an amazing Thanksgiving Break! If you are planning on seeing family, please remember to wear your mask and wash your hands! Bring a mini sanitizer bottle! If people judge, then ignore them because you’re just trying to stay safe and you know what. I appreciate you!!! Because that is what I do, I am never without my hand sanitizer bottle!! Have a very happy turkey day!!
- Bay :-)
