One Approach to a Familiar Teaching Tool

The AICs post a weekly tech tips podcast, and this week's episode is about an approach to teaching that is very much in line with formative assessment, and the whole checking for understanding approach to monitoring (or having students themselves monitor their) mastery of a topic.

CPS clickers, which can be used in a variety of engaging ways following this approach to teaching, have arrived in our district on a larger scale, but a far greater number of students have access to a laptop on a daily basis than the clickers. For that reason, we wanted to show the steps to turning a device with Internet access into a clicker.

Here are the tools you'll need to get started:

Internet Access.

An account with Google.

If you don't have an account, this is not difficult to remedy... go to docs.google.com and click on "Create an account now." Supply an email address, create a password, and answer a few questions.

Then, from your home page at Google Docs, click "Create New," and click "Form."

Enter questions about the skill your students are exploring, the answers to which reveal their levels of mastery.

I know, I know... I just glossed over one of the toughest jobs in teaching! But that part is on you.)

You can enter a topic, directions, your question, some help text, the type, possible answers, and save your first question. To enter a second question, type it in the next box. To go back and edit your question, click the pencil. To duplicate your question (to alter it for the next question but keep the same answer bank), click the duplicate button. Save your work.

Select the appearance of your form by clicking on "Theme" and selecting one that fits.

Your students can access the form using the link supplied at the bottom, but to make it easier for them to get there, you might embed the form on your wiki or your teacher web page.

To work with the data your students generate, return to your Google Docs home page and click on the form you created. You will see a spreadsheet with your students' answers. The data can be easily copied and pasted into Excel, which will allow you to sort your students' responses, or even graph them visually.

This is some neat stuff. If you can't get your hands on the set of clickers soon enough, but you can get your students in a lab or on laptops / minis, try creating a form and working with the results in Excel.

Next week... AIC Awards.
Catch you then.