Facilitating a lively, interactive discussion in which all students participate is sometimes challenging in a high school class. One way to help accomplish that goal is to integrate technology into a discussion. I have highlighted a few tools below that I have either used as a teacher in high school or as a student in my graduate classes.
- free and easy to set up
- pick a name for the “room” for the meeting
- choose how long to keep the room active (from one hour to one month)
- teachers can create a free account to manage rooms
- allows teachers to view a transcript of the comments after students participate
Devices:
- works better on a tablet/laptop than on a smartphone
Participation features:
- students can type comments including up to 140 characters
- the comments are organized with newer comments added to the top of the list
- free and easy to set up an account
- teachers can create questions, save them to reuse, and see data/records of students’ responses
- write questions before class and make them “live” during the discussion
Devices:
- works on computers and mobile devices
Participation features:
- questions can be multiple choice, true-false, or short answer
- responses can be displayed in a bar graph or in a text list
- teacher can choose to show students’ names or make responses anonymous
- free and easy to set up an account
- teachers can create questions and save them to reuse
- write questions before class and make them “live” during the discussion
Devices:
- students may respond to the poll by texting or on the website
Participation features:
- questions can be multiple choice, true-false, or free response
- responses can be displayed in a bar graph or in a text list
- responses are anonymous, which may be helpful when discussing sensitive topics
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