Activity 8: Polling and Data Gathering

POLL EVERYWHERE: I use Google Forms regularly to collect assignment responses from my students, so I decided to play around with PollEverywhere a bit. I signed up for a free account. I like that with Poll Everywhere, you can create a poll that can either be clicked on for Web Voting OR can be embedded as a Live Chart in which viewers can text their responses. I decided to create polls I could use at the start of the school year with both my colleagues and my students, similar in their topic.

Here is a poll I created that I would use to ask my colleagues at the end of August. I think this would give an idea of our staff strengths/weaknesses, needs, and thinking directly from the minds of our staff. This might be helpful for our PBIS team to support staff as the year begins.


Here is a similar one I would use with my students, having them borrow one of my class iPads or complete at home, during the first week of school. This would hopefully help build some quality discussion in my classes and help students see that while they are all different and unique, they are working toward common goals.

My complaint about PollEverywhere is that I didn't find the ease of embedding iinto this blog post that I find with Google Forms. The snippet appears in my HTML compose view but looks empty under the traditional Compose view. I also can't figure out how to center the polls so that they are not to the left. Perhaps I just need to research some HTML code for that... but being able to see my Google Form from the regular Compose view where I can choose to center it myself with the traditional "justify" option makes my like Google Forms better.

GOOGLE FORMS: PollEverywhere is fine if I want responses anonymous, but for instructional purposes, I definitely prefer Google Forms. I am excited that this year we are able to input images into the forms - what an improvement this will be both visually and for units in which images are essential to understanding, such as geometry. Here is one example of a Google Form I created last year that I posted on my Moodle page beneath my math video. Students would watch the video, respond by completing the form, and the data would be available to me immediately. I used that data to decide who was learning what the next morning. This formative assessment tool made a big impact on the way I taught math last year. I had a much better idea of who understood what BEFORE the kids walked in the door last year, compared to previous years when I needed to spend time asking questions and figuring that out as the class period progressed.

Activity 7: Cloud Computing

Google Drive has become my go-to place for creating and sharing work, both at work and at school. I love the ease of creation, the simplicity of sharing, the ability to simultaneously work on a single document with others - it has been a lifesaver in many team meetings.

Here is a Google "Presentation" that I put together last year on Idioms. My colleagues and I used this to teach one new idiom each day to our language arts classes.

Google Presentation: IDIOMS

Instead of the traditional powerpoint, I used Presentation to do this because it allowed my colleagues to add their own examples to it as well. The Google auto-save function is amazing and eliminated the need to add/edit this document and re-save to our team shared folder. We were all able to access it and often needed to do so at the very same time. There were times I had made a typo and as I am showing a slide to my class, my colleague is sharing it with her class and fixing my typo. TEAMWORK.

Last year was the first year I really started accepting, or more so ENCOURAGING, my students to submit their assignments to me electronically. When I discovered that one of my students had a personal Gmail address and slightly familiar with Google Docs, I realized the realm of possibilities using this app beyond my personal/colleague life and into my actual instruction. I taught my students how to create a Google Doc (which of course then changed to Google Drive and was temporarily confusing for some of them!) and "Share" it with me. I had a lot of pushback from parents last year as far as expecting my students to have their own email addresses so I only accepted documents to be "Shared" with me if parents had given their child permission to set up a Gmail address. The feature was WONDERFUL - fewer papers for me to lose! In addition, I started providing feedback to the kids using the "Comments" feature and began to allow them to submit work early so that I could give feedback before the actual deadline. There were only a handful of my kids who used the Google Docs feature, but I think that will skyrocket this next year as I now know that the students' Gmail addresses actually provide access to Google Drive and other Google Apps - so no personal Gmail required and few complaining parents!