My extremely-learned and sharing colleague, Adrian, has kindly offered to share his login to Votapedia - a free audience response by mobile-phone service. Votapedia is a project that is in beta and is run by the CSIRO. I am planning to use it in our group presentation on Thursday.
The product has a number of options… but essentially you come up with a question and develop a list of options. Your audience dials a number to select a response. Dialling the number is free.
You can develop your survey via the web. It has an option for development on a mobile phone – although I haven’t used that one yet.
Here is a screenshot of one of the development screens.
Using voting capabilities in a meaningful way – it’s not about getting answers “right” and “wrong”
On the way home from the lecture, I was listening to a podcast titled Technology-Enabled Active Learning.
My extremely wonderful husband never lets me leave for uni without an MP3 CD that will play in my car’s stereo full of interesting podcasts. It takes me about two-hours drive each way, depending on traffic, so these podcasts are great! I really appreciate Peter’s wonderful acts of kindness! … oh and I guess I just revealed something about myself which is kinda sad… I don’t own an MP3 player!
Anyway, back to the podcast… the podcast was talking about a program running at MIT that was encouraging students to actively participate in the learning process – not just merely attend (or not attend) lectures. To me, it sounded similar to what we believe good teaching is in schools – however the way they were doing it appeared to be replicable to large groupings – the sort of numbers you get in a uni course. Part of what they were doing used clicker personal response systems… similar to Votapedia – except they don’t use mobile phone technology – you need to have proprietory devices to do it.
Years ago, when we first started thinking about using personal response units in schools I thought they were an extremely over priced way to run a quiz show. While I thought it cold be engaging, I didn’t think the expense was warranted if all you wanted to do was ask kids questions like “What year did Captain Cook discover Australia”.
The point that was made in the podcast is that using these devices is not about asking those sorts of fact-based questions, it’s about asking broader concept questions that can be used as discussion starters. In fact the answer to the question isn’t what is important – it’s the discussion that ensues following it. The advantage of using these personal response systems is that:
- they’re anonymous – so people feel they can be honest
- even the quiet person in the backrow gets their say
- you get to see the group concensus – not just what the loudest person in the group thinks.
Example – Go Go GIDGITS
I saw the power of this a couple of years ago. I was running a girls online computer club called Go Go GIDGITS. The club had a handful of girls from around Queensland who were student leaders. These students leaders were coming together for a two-day camp. One of their tasks was to run a workshop for girls from other schools. Most of the students leaders had never met each other face to face before and they varied in age from 9 years old up to 15 years old. I’d asked a colleague of mine, Jodie (an excellent teacher), to come and talk to the girls about how to run a good workshop. At the beginning of the session she used the personal response unit to ask the girls how they were feeling about running training for other girls – the responses they could choose from included nervous, excited, scared, etc. This was a really nice way to gauge how the girls were really feeling. It revealed that some of them were feeling quite apprehensive about it. Jodie then went through some video snippets from The Simpsons that showed examples of good teaching and bad teaching (who knew that the simpsons had such great commentary on teaching!). From these videos the girls made their own list of what makes a good teacher. At the end of the session, she then asked them again how they felt about running the workshop – and it revealed that they were feeling much better about it A really simple example… but I thought it was worth sharing… watching what Jodie did made me realise that, like most technology, it’s not what you do but how you do it.
