Here are the results of the two polls I included in this weekend’s post, “PollEverywhere grappling with Monetization and Free Educator Plans.” There were 24 respondents to the first poll, and 20 respondents to the second. Those participation totals are not sufficient to give these informal polls much statistical power, but they do highlight the amounts some educators think they and their school would be willing to pay for the web service functionality of PollEveryWhere. Mouse over / click each graph and choose FULL SCREEN to view them at a higher resolution.
PollEverywhere co-founder Jeff’s post, “Should we even offer a free product for educators?” has received sixteen comments to date. One of them is from Brad, the other co-founder of PollEverywhere, who wrote:
What if we offered some sort of community support for educators? What would this look like amongst you folks? What tools/websites would you prefer to use to support other teachers who want to use Poll Everywhere in the classroom? This idea is particularly intriguing to me because all of you will run circles around us in understanding the pedagogical applications of Poll Everywhere, and probably come up with some videos of our product being used in the classroom that we’d love to blog about.
One of the best things which could come out of a learning community, or simply a collaborative project like VoiceThread4Education, is a list of examples for how a particular tool or website is being used by students and teachers in classrooms. Particularly when tools are used in engaging, complex lessons, I think a great deal can be learned not only about HOW (from a technical standpoint) a particular tool can be used, but also WHY it is used to achieve specific objectives.
It is a very small example, but last semester my 4th grade daughter was asked to conduct a survey for her math class. Students came up with the question they wanted to ask, and then tracked results as they asked people their question. Sarah asked, “What is your favorite Girl Scout Cookie?” and built the survey with PollEverywhere. She then posted it to our family learning blog, and received over 150 responses. Of course, the fact that I tweeted out a request for others to respond undoubtedly boosted the response rate for this survey. It was fun to both watch these responses “come in” live, and also discuss the results.
One of the best assignments my seventh grade math teacher (Mrs. Allen at Manhattan Middle School, in Manhattan, Kansas) gave us as a class was to create our own “word problems” for extra credit. She used these (often creative) word problems at the start of class as a warm-up activity. Gathering and analyzing live data with survey tools like PollEverywhere can have multiple classroom applications, extending far beyond math classes. I think a learning community where educators share these types of classroom uses / applications is a great idea.
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