Live Lesson Student Feedback
About 3 weeks ago, I posted on Twitter asking for some pointers on how to get student feedback during live lessons during remote learning.
I received some excellent feedback, but none better than @TeachKenyon, who kindly went on to write an excellent blog about feedback in Teams here:
As a Computer Science Teacher, I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could develop something bespoke. The key criteria was that it should be simple to use and allow me to re-use previous questions.
The reason for the latter criterion was that I find myself asking the same question over and over again:
Do you get it?
How confident are you right now?
In teams, I usually ask students to put their hand up if they understand or are confident in what they need to do next, but one of the issues I find is that not all students feel comfortable raising their hand and I have no long term ability to record that.
Secondly, after I ask Students to put their hands down, inevitably, some are not listening, so I end up saying to multiple students:
Bob, your hand is still up, do you have a question?
and they inevitably reply:
Sorry miss, didn’t realise it was still up
This tends to eat in to the learning time and often, students put their hand up and down so quickly, it is hard to tell which did it.
Fast forward to the app
So it took a week longer than I had planned. What between live teaching all day, several after Schools and lunch clubs a week and parents evenings, it took me 3 weeks.
It integrates in to Teams in that you can get a list of your classes and select from those and get a list of Students. Alternatively, you can just manually enter a class:
Once connected, the Teacher is provided with a class code. Ultimately, there will be a login option for students, but for GDPR and speed, I opted for simplicity.
As students connect, the Teacher is able to see who has connected, and how many at a glance. For GDPR purposes, no data is stored on the Server at all. When the student enters their name, it is simply relayed to the Teacher’s browser and as such no consent is needed.
The Options
Once connected, their are three “poll” types. RAG, Thumbs up/down and a simple quiz.
As each student responds, the data and a graph updates:
Templates
To meet my second criterion, the history list contains a history of all questions that are marked as templates. Clicking on a template initiates the poll with the exact same question, minimising effort:
Finally, you can go through each item in the History and view the data and graph for each entry or download an excel spreadsheet of the entire history to give you a permanent record of all the interactions
Is it useful?
I have used it with a number of classes range from Year 7 to Year 12. It is handy to not have to worry about asking students to put their hands down and allows more granular RAG rating.
Student feedback of the app has been positive. They consider it easy to use (1 click). You do have to “leave” Teams to use it, but you have to do that with the Kahoot Teams app and the permissions for that are a GDPR nightmare.
Conclusion
Of course, this will not help the thousands of students with no access to PC’s or devices, but for those that do, it has been useful in my mini trial.
Teams and Classroom have their own built in options, which may well be preferential, and @TeachKenyon’s blog certainly gives you plenty of options.
There are still bugs to iron out and I would like volunteers to test it out before releasing it as a free app.
I am also working with an Ed Tech supplier of homework and quizzes to add it to their offering, which links to SIMS and other School Management Systems to add the ability to remove room codes, store the history and templates permanently and to be able to load questions in advance as pre-made templates.