Module 6: SRS Showdown

Student Response Systems (SRS) are very beneficial in the classroom.  In this way, students can engage with the lesson in a unique way that tests their understanding of the subject, allowing the teacher to assess them in a variety of ways.  SRS can have their own specific purposes, but the most common are to take polls and quizzes with real time feedback for the teacher to review.

In class, we were assigned a group that would teach a specific SRS tool to our classmates as well as other instructors who may find the tools beneficial.  While many of the tools were discussed and taught during class, I am going  to focus on sharing my thoughts on 3 of these tools:  Formative, Answer Garden, and Class Responder.

My group actually presented Formative (click text for the link) to our class.  Formative is a unique SRS tool that is valuable, not only for teachers, but for students as well.  Using Formative, teachers can create homework assignments, give quizzes and give assessments in order to gauge a student's understanding of a particular subject in real time.  My group focused on how to make an account and how to create a quiz.  The quizzes were easy to make, and it was interesting that there were different types of questions.  There was the typical multiple choice, true or false, short answer, but there was also a show your work kind of question.  This would be especially beneficial for math teachers, because rather than seeing the correct answer to the math problem, they can view whether or not they truly understood why the correct answer was correct.  For this specific feature, it would be better for students to use their phone or their tablet for Formative.  Not all students may have access to a tablet or a phone, so this may be a small downfall  Creating the quiz and taking it is easy, but grading the quizzes are also just as easy.  The teachers can view the live results.  They could have already preset the correct answers, but teachers also have the ability to adjust the grade to however they see fit by sliding a bar to either a higher grade or a lower grade.  They can view the progress of the individual and the class as a whole.  Personally, I would use this as a secondary English teacher.  I think it is very beneficial for student learning.

The second SRS that I found interesting, but could be very valuable is Answer Garden.  With this tool, a teacher can receive a real time response from their students as a minimalistic feedback tool.  Creating a question using this tool is very easy to do, as a teacher, and for students, all they need is a technology tool.  The teacher would simply create a question, set a mode (brainstorm, classroom, moderator, or locked).  There is also a useful setting where you can filter the spam answers automatically.  In brainstorm mode, students can answer unlimitedly, without the teacher's consent.  This would be useful for more mature college students, but can be used for the junior high and high school level.  Classroom mode only allows one answer per student, but the answers appear without the teacher's consent as well.  In the junior high and high school grades, this could be a potential issue due to the fact that the students may be a bit more rowdy and inappropriate with their language.  Therefor, it would be recommended that teachers use moderator mode.  In this mode, the teacher can manually filter answers that they feel are not appropriate or are not related to the topic.  Answers get sent to the Anti-Garden.  In the end, there should be a "garden" or a "cloud" of different answers jumbled together.  If multiple people type the same thing, the answer will appear bigger in this garden.  I believe that overall, this is a useful tool.  Especially for my classroom, it will help my lessons get straight to the point.  I could ask them a quick question before I start a unit to see my students' initial ideas or after the unit to test understanding.

The last SRS tool that I want to discuss is Class Responder.  In Class Responder, teachers can assign lessons, and students immediately can see and complete it by responding with their answers in real time.  As a teacher, you can view each student's individual responses, but also have the ability to view these responses from a classroom level.  Some of the benefits to using this tool is that the assessments are automatically scored.  Also, making and taking the quizzes are easy to carry out.  The most common questions are multiple choice and true or false.  For the most part, the students are given a choice rather than using critical thinking skills, which I believe is a disadvantage to the tool.  Another function of Class Responder is that teachers can conduct quick polls.  Unfortunately, the teacher must write the question and possible choices on an alternate surface, and the students can only answer A, B, C, or D.  One other advantage, if it were the right classroom, is that there are apps that the students can use.  Again, it would be difficult for those who do not have access to these technological items.  As a teacher, I don't think I would be using Class Responder, because I believe it is geared more towards the elementary age.  As a secondary English teacher, I should be concerned with more critical thinking questions rather than solely multiple choice or true/false.

Overall, all these SRS tools can be very beneficial to a classroom, and the tools I mentioned serve different functions and different ages.  It was nice for me to learn about all of these tools, because I may end up using them for my class one day.

Module 5: My Flip Project on Public Speaking

Becoming an English Education major, I never expected to be in the classroom, teaching so early.  Sure, I'm observing right now at a middle school, but when I mentioned this Flip Classroom project to my supervising teacher, she thought it was a great idea.  In discussing what I could teach about, we both decided that the most beneficial item to discuss for her 8th graders was the subject of public speaking.  In my teacher's class, they are giving research presentations at the end of the quarter.  Many of them have not given speeches before, so my teacher suggested that I talk about speech delivery.  Speech delivery would be a great and beneficial subject to discuss, but the problem was, it would be difficult to produce critical thinking questions based on speech delivery alone.

Thankfully, Eden, a classmate (and dear friend of mine) wanted to work with me.  She brought up the idea of incorporating the 4 different types of speeches to these students.  It would be important for them to know in the future as well.  I asked my teacher if this would be acceptable, and she was completely for it!

So, we created the project on Prezi, putting all the necessary information that these students will need to know for when they give their presentations and the potential they could take away for the future.  Making the Prezi took a good amount of time as well as composing an informal script.  Once we put it all together, the next day, I presented it to two of her classes.

Since I would be there for 4 class periods, I had the opportunity to teach the same lesson to 32 of her students.  My teacher actually gave me control of the classroom for the period which was scary to think about.  I was just glad that these students were already used to my presence. She instructed these students to bring their headphones and to use their Chromebooks (which the school provides) to watch the presentation.  I explained all the directions to them and let them begin.  After the presentation, I instructed them to take the quiz afterwards.  When they were finished, we actually went over the correct answers, and for the rest of the class period, my teacher and I answered their questions.  The students did well overall, meaning that they understood the concepts.  But, we basically spent the rest of the period explaining why the correct answers were right and the wrong answers were wrong.  The purpose of this was so that in leaving the class, they would feel more confident about presenting than they did before.  I definitely believe I succeeded in that.

I think that the Flip Project is very useful in the classroom, and as a future teacher, I can see myself using this.  I found it very valuable, and I truly believe that the 8th graders found it valuable as well.