Module 6: Student Response Systems

The concept of Student Response Systems (SRS) was pretty new to me. I had experience with course management systems (CMS) such as Managebac and Moodle, but never in the smaller scale of SRS. Having more variety in SRS, I enjoyed exploring each one of them and comparing which ones I like best.

I really enjoyed Socrative in it's format and features. It is first of all really easy to use. Making quizzes is effortless through this SRS program, making it easy for busy teachers to use and set up. There are also different modes that lets the teachers control the pacing and use it for a variety of assessments, along with being able to track student's progress live. I think this feature is important because then we can clearly see which questions the students are struggling with and then either go address it to the entire class if it is a common occurrence, or work with one or two kids that could be seen struggling. Looking at this data live would also enable teachers to see how the students pace themselves through this assignment.

Other SRS are also cool, such as AnswerGarden and PollEverywhere, as more and more of my professors have used it in my classes. PollEverywhere is pretty great because they allow text response, which is great for older students or large group settings where the audience does not necessarily have a smartphone/tablet/laptop with them but could depend on the availability of phones that text. AnswerGarden is another system that asks students what they think about a subject or a question and those short responses are then arranged in a word cloud. This is pretty brilliant in my opinion, as it brings the students back to the classroom with technology rather than having the students get distracted out of the classroom by technology. It allows the teacher to see what the students are thinking collectively, and discuss why the students think that way. Though in comparison to Socrative, PollEverywhere and AnswerGarden lets the students be anonymous. This could be an issue when we want to track down an individual's participation and progress, but could also be beneficial when wanting to hear different opinions, especially those who are usually shy or unwilling to share.

I think it'll be interesting to see CMS such as Moodle work together with a SRS such as Socrative. It'll be nice for the students and teachers to not have multiple accounts and passwords to remember, and to have all the data from the SRS centralized and all put together.

MODULE 5: Flipped Classroom Project

When I first heard about the flipped classroom, I was slightly confused. It felt more like a college type class setting, in which we do a lot of the reading and prep work outside of class, to be given a further explanation in the form of a lecture. The flipped classroom is slightly similar, with the prep work and learning done outside of class - but in class, the students are to do the work with the assistance and guidance of the teacher.

I think this is an interesting concept to implement. First of all, students that are struggling could do this lesson at their own pace, ensuring their understanding. They could pause, repeat, slow things down in the lesson so that they can make sure they fully understand the concepts taught.

The only issue I have with it is that most of my students do not have access to a computer at home, which limits the effectiveness of the flipped classroom. It is too reliant upon the availability and access to technology the students have, and with students in poorer communities, this could be a struggle. My students would miss watching the video as they did not have access to it at home, and during after school library hours, they are unable to attend or forget to attend. It's hard to plan out flipped classroom lessons when we have to keep this factor in mind. Perhaps, a flipped classroom lesson that can be done with a reading assignment on paper could be considered to be accessible for the students at home when they don't have access to these sort of technology.

It was also a good experience for me to learn how to develop questions that requires a certain level of thinking. Getting their responses back was a good feedback to see how well I could deliver the content for them to understand. It was also a good way for my supervising teacher and I to know what the students knowledge are about things we thought they'd know already, for instance, the proper formatting and usage of quotation marks.

With Google Forms, we could see a summary in which questions the students were struggling most, and proper formatting and usage of quotation marks was one. Seeing the results indicated to me and my teacher that we should adjust our lesson plans to accommodate to making sure our students learn this concept in another lesson.