We had another Taste of Tech at school on Wednesday morning and we are really happy with the results. Three of us did a show-and-tell of student response systems. This is the LiveBinders from our session. We didn’t use the time exactly the way we planned. We ended up dividing the time equally between the three subjects TodaysMeet, Socrative, and Promethean clickers. 

TodaysMeet was a big hit so we added some time to it and took away the Question and Answer session we planned at the end. TodaysMeet does not require anything more from a teacher than naming the room, and then giving the address of the room to your students. Students type a name and then click join. Our participants loved it. TodaysMeet is a Web 2.0 tool often used as a backchannel at conferences.

Socrative was also a huge hit. It was the first time for all of them to see the space race, one of the quiz choices available, and they become enthusiastic about this Web 2.0 program that requires only an email address from the teacher, and a user name. Students just need to know the room number to enter and join the room. Socrative has an app available for both students and teachers, but students used their devices without downloading the app. It is easy to work in Socrative directly in the browser window on your smart phone.

Our third area was Promethean Board clickers. We have a few sets of them belonging to various departments. You don’t need a Promethean Board to use them but you need the software. It takes a bit more time to learn to use than Socrative and TodaysMeet, which have no learning curve, but they can be effective and for those teachers who have access to the equipment it’s worth the time to learn. For those who had never seen them, they enjoyed seeing them in action.

It was great to see the tools put into action the very next day. Two of our teachers used both TodaysMeet and Socrative, and one of the teachers had another teacher sitting in to observe. And yet another teacher has started preparing her quizzes in Socrative. According to the teachers, the students were engaged and lively.

I think our session worked so well because we had Web 2.0 tools that could be used immediately on any device that can connect to the Internet without downloads of any sort or a learning curve, and we also offered an overview to the exciting world of clickers which we have available at our school.