Just the Ticket
Well the School year is coming to an end and we have time to reflect on some great practice. I would really like to spend a few minutes looking at some of the engaging techniques that my wonderful colleagues have used for discussions and exit tickets.
Jacqueline Harris - Todays Meet
Jacqui took a risk. She tried something she had never used before. She wanted to make feedback more engaging. To do this she used TodaysMeet. You can open this for a specific period of time, the pupils can only use 140 characters per comment, you can print the transcript.
Her thoughts were that:
Students really enjoyed providing feedback with peers in a live situation. Safe learning environment : private, character limitation worked well, especially for less confident students afraid of making too many mistakes when lots of writing. Similar to Twitter: familiar format for students (so they shared their knowledge and taught me!)Fun, quick, live situation - making language learning real
However, she would have created a possible pre-activity and a discussion around awareness and ownership of online posting.
This is a great point - How are we tackling this aspect? If we are asking pupils to post more blogs and comments how do we make them more self aware?
Bradley Bond - Padlet
Brad wanted to develop a discussion board with the pupils that he could use again. Just like Jacqui he took a risk. He tried something completely new. He wanted a place where pupils could contribute, read ideas from other people and comment on these ideas. Once created a Padlet can be kept so the pupils could reflect on the same discussion later in the course - who knows they may have changed their opinion!
His thoughts were:
In Math 9 I wanted to have students contribute to a conversation regarding the calculations that go into proclamations of area. Specifically we were looking at using triangulation (breaking the area of irregular shape into acute triangles) to calculate the area of the Zugersee. The discussion was to be done online. The only tool that I had previously used was the discussion board on Schoology. I decided to ask students to give me their advice on how to moderate the discussion and they suggested using Padlet. I had never used this before but I took their suggestion and got to work. It was relatively easy to get started and I got Cate to assist me with the final steps relating to sharing the link to the Padlet and adjusting privacy settings so that students could edit. It was a much more rich (and multi-media) experience than past Schoology discussions.
Adeline Lordet has also been using Padlet as a way of collating questions from pupils at the end/start of a topic and then using this as the starting point for revision discussions and class activities
John Dalesio - Google SheetsJohn uses many different, imaginative techniques to interact with pupils from Kiva to Twitter. However, I really wanted to share this example of an exit ticket technique. He has used a simple Google Sheet approach with the activity along the top. The pupils benefit from being able to look at each others work which can often help pupils further engage with a topic. Also there is a variety of exit ticket approaches - from key words, metaphors and statements to writing blog posts. This enables the pupils to show their knowledge in a variety of ways and stretches their think processes. A great technique to check on understand and can provide you with excellent starting points for the next lesson.
Here are 3 ideas of good practice. What do you do? Can you suggest any other approaches that have worked for you?