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Streamlining Classroom Technologies

I get a little over-exuberant about educational technologies – and can go a little overboard with the number of tech tools I use in the classroom. This semester, I started with three technologies: Socrative, a Facebook Group, and a class website where I’m hosting the syllabus, Google forms for assignment submission, and our class blog (currently private, per our class consensus). Those three technologies all have different advantages that I hoped to tap into:

Socrative is a free clicker app that lets me do real-time polls in class, collect attendance, and ask for feedback at the end of class. I used it last semester and I liked the platform – though it can be a little unpredictable. (The mobile app simply refuses to respond sometimes.) The responses are neatly compiled into a spreadsheet that I can either store for later or send to my Google Drive immediately. I can open and close polls – which means I can track which students are late based on who responds to the exit quiz at the end of class, but not the attendance quiz at the beginning. I can also switch up the room name, which reduces the possibility of students logging in remotely, thereby receiving credit for attendance without showing up in class. (For a variety of reasons, that happens from time to time.)

The Facebook Group is working well as a space to share links related to class and to post short announcements without flooding student inboxes. It also allows me to message students privately or as a group – and they’re wonderful at responding promptly. I’m hoping the FB Group will eventually grow into a space where students collaborate with one another and share links and articles they find as well.

The class website is the hub of all of our class information and is proving to be a super flexible online space. WordPress has a couple of limitations (most notably, there’s no way to create tables on pages or in posts) but there are workarounds (I upload screenshots if something must be presented in a table – like our blog post/comment rubric or the grade scale in the syllabus). Otherwise, it’s been easy to adapt the website to what I need it to accomplish – I started with pages for announcements, the syllabus, and a blog, and have since expanded the pages/categories to include a space for class slides, organizational resources, and the schedule for students’ blog posts.

My favorite feature by far, though, is the ability to embed Google Forms into pages and posts. This means I can ask students to submit discussion questions and other assignments directly through the class website. Their submissions are all compiled into a neat spreadsheet on Google Drive – just like Socrative.

Which brings me (finally) to the title of this blog post: I really need to streamline my classroom technologies.

Because, at the moment, I am using two technologies that are essentially accomplish the same things. Both Socrative and Google Forms can be used as polling mechanisms, I can take attendance through both (submissions through forms are time stamped), and asking for the exit quiz is a non-issue (I don’t read that until after class anyway). Plus both tools funnel collected information into spreadsheets on Google Drive. Socrative has a couple very slight advantages over Google Forms – it’s more aesthetically pleasing and updates more effectively for real-time responses – but Google Forms works more consistently. For me, that’s a decisive advantage and using Forms alone allows me to simplify the technologies used in the classroom.

So, for today’s class, I created a page for “Quizzes” on our class website and a post that contains Forms for today’s attendance quiz, a brainstorming/definition quiz, and the exit quiz. I’ve provided details regarding the path to access the Forms on my slides for each quiz (“Class Website -> Quizzes -> Quizzes for 2/4”) that I’m hoping will make the switch fairly seamless. Keep an eye out for future posts on the success or failure of this little experiment!

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