Polls and Surveys to Connect with Your Students

Online instructors, especially those teaching asynchronously without video or audio conferences, often express that they don’t know how their students are “feeling”, or if their students are confused, or frustrated with aspects of the course. Survey tools are plentiful and make surveys simple to deploy. Surveys may be one of the most powerful tools in your teaching arsenal, whether you are teaching online or face-to-face. A well-written survey can collect a wealth of information in a short time span. But surveys can do so much for your class.

  • Surveys can empower students. When you use a survey to find out what students want to learn or ask them to pinpoint areas that they still find confusing, you are asking them to help personalize their learning.
  • Surveys can also be used to compare different attitudes and showcase how different student views on various course topics might be.
  • Surveys can also let you know how effective different components of your course are. If you are spending hours on creating videos, are they effective? Are students watching? Do they have the technical skills to watch? Are your students getting out of your course what they need?
  • End-of-course surveys help us to determine which parts of the course should be kept and which parts need to be modified.

Let’s take a look at some of the tools that are free and easy to use.

Poll Everywhere: A survey service that lets you collect responses via the Internet, tablets, text messaging on phone, or by twitter. Survey results are instantly available. The free account plugs right into PPT so you can use it while lecturing. The free version limits you to 40 respondents. The responses can also be viewed as word clouds.

Google Forms: Free and easy to use you can easily create a form that feeds results into a spreadsheet. While the results may not be as pretty as some survey tools, Google forms are quick to create and easy to launch.

Socrative: Works on any device and operating system. Includes games, quiz questions, on-the-fly questioning and other easy to use features.

SurveyMonkey: The free version of survey monkey allows you to ask up to 10 questions and get 100 responses. You can gather responses from email, websites, Twitter, Facebook and more.

Blackboard has a survey tool built-in and Collaborate also permits polling with results hidden or visible to students. Collaborate has a Wizard Quick Guide Reference to help you get started. Both Blackboard tools are quick and easy to implement.

These are just a few examples. Common Sense Graphite posted their Top Tech Tools for Formative Assessment and there are many there (nicely rated and described) for you to explore.

Our upcoming “Share” or “Challenge” is on Polls and Surveys — did you guess that already? Be looking for more information in our next post!

Now it’s your turn to answer our quick poll so that you can help us pick some of the upcoming topics for future Faculty Challenges.

 

If you have another suggestion please leave us a comment below!

Tech Tuesday – Adobe Voice

voiceAdobe Voice is today’s Tech Tuesday topic. We blogged about creating an online presence last week and Adobe Voice is one way you can do that!

Adobe Voice is an iPad app that lets you easily create 60-90 second videos. This fun digital storytelling app allows you to make a professional impact by connecting with your audience using creative animated videos and presentations. The app has over 25,000 images and icons to choose from, or you can use your own. You can make your video private of public. Kathi made her introduction to Blackboard: Behind the Scenes using Adobe Voice.

If your students have iPads, have them use the app for assignments – maybe a field trip journal, book report, or personal introduction.

Each video you publish will appear on its own Voice web page. No unrelated videos, no random ads — just your story in the center of the page, in high-quality HD. You can also embed it where you want on your own web page. Anyone can watch them from wherever they are, on a phone, tablet device, or computer.

…In Voice, just tap Share, and you can share your video on Twitter, Facebook, email, messages/SMS, or anywhere else you can put a link, without thinking about file types. You can also embed the videos on your web page.

This is a free app but you will need an Adobe account. Setting up an account is free and easy to do – get started at Adobe Education Exchange.

Need an iPad? Read our blog post about iPads for faculty!

Fried Friday: Can you bottle or brand your online persona? Voting Time!

Sometimes an old idea can be recycled into some new and novel. Take for example this new rendition of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” by the Bottle Boys. They certainly have talent, but is it more than talent that has captured them over 4 million hits on YouTube? Have they created a unique persona and stage presence? Can we do something similar (perhaps slightly less grandiose) in our online courses?

Remember it’s Fried Friday – so this post is definitely lighter than some of our others, but the message is clear– we too have something to say, but how do we get our message across to our students and have them coming back for more? These guys have figured it out!

It’s Friday, so enjoy this light post and start voting for your favorite below! This week you can cast three (3) votes for 3 different submissions. Help us to select a winner! Voting close Monday, October 6 at noon.

 

JS10 JM10
KB10 CB10
AS10

 

Deadline for Professional Development Opportunity

 

Tech Tuesday: Livescribe Smartpens

livescribe penThis week we’re featuring the Livescribe Smartpen, available for checkout in the IDC. The Livescribe Smartpen captures everything you hear in a meeting room, lecture or work-group. While you are drawing a diagram or drawing symbols or shapes, it is capturing the discussion that went into that drawing. All of these notes can then be transferred to either Mac or PC and are accessible and searchable by iPhone or iPad.

The pen captures the audio in a room quite nicely and the special interactive notebook paper synchronizes the pen’s audio with what you capture on paper. Quite an amazing bridge between “old style” note-taking and “new style” interactive technology!

We invite you to give the Livescribe Smartpens a try. Bring it to the next TLTR meeting or campus/department meeting and see how you like it. There are many applications besides note-taking for these smartpens as well as some how-to articles at 12 Ways Educators and Students are Using the Pen Today. While many of these are K12 examples, they might generate some ideas for your use of these pens, beyond capturing meeting minutes.

Interested UAS Sitka Faculty can stop by the IDC and check one out. Let us know how you use the pen!

Fried Friday: Invisible Faculty? Not This Math Instructor!

This week we’ve been Click to view videotalking about creating your online persona. Sometimes students complain that they don’t feel their professor is active or visible in the course. We hope that you never hear complaints about your course or your sense of presence in your classroom.

We thought you might enjoy the clever way this math instructor introduces his topic of “Imaginary Numbers” to his classroom. After watching this video, I think you’d agree that this instructor made an impression on his students. We hope you enjoy this funny video and we look forward to seeing your submissions to the Creating Your Online Persona Challenge.

Click image to view the video.

While you may not create something this elaborate, there are so many ways that you might invest a little time for that huge pay-off, having your students really connect with you even if they never meet you face-to-face.You might enjoy looking at some of the examples posted in a PPT presentation created by Bill Phillips, University of Omaha. He provides many excellent ideas and a variety of examples. The Online Teaching Persona.

And don’t forget to send in your submission for the FLC Faculty Challenge on Creating Your Sense of Presence. You can scroll down for the post describing the challenge. If you need any help, please don’t hesitate to call Kathi/Maureen/Nicole or Tina. We’ll be voting next week, so get your submissions in soon! You can click the banner to view submissions as they are submitted.

Click for exmaples

 

Professional Development Opportunity

newspaper imageSitka Title III will cover the tuition costs for UAS faculty to take Quality Matters’ Applying the Quality Matters Rubric course. This online course is intended to increase your understanding of the QM rubric and of the peer review process.

The UAS Peer Review for Course Improvement committee requires this course of all who are interested in becoming official course reviewers. Once faculty have taken this two week online course and learned to use a rubric to evaluate an online course and provide meaningful feedback, they are eligible to participate in the Peer Review of a UAS course.

Although the course is asynchronous, the course must be completed in the two week period and takes about 4-6 hours a week. The dates available are:

  • October 28 – November 11
  • November 4 – November 18
  • November 11 – November 25

Send an email to Mary Purvis prior to October 6 if you’d like to take this course and let her know the dates that work for you.

Image credit: iStockPhoto: BrianAJackson

Faculty Presence — a FLC Faculty Challenge!

Crowd of peopleFaculty presence is crucial for both online and face-to-face courses. This topic is so important that there are many books and articles written on the subject. A book we often recommend at iTeach is Rosemary Lehman’s “Creating a Sense of Presence in Online Teaching: How to ‘Be There’ for Distance Learners.”  In her book Ms. Lehman describes faculty presence as looking and feeling, to your students, that you are present and accessible in your course. Of course, there are many ways to accomplish this.

Recent technological advances have made video a tool often used to create a sense of presence. But there are many other tools that help us convey this same sense of being present and interested in the learner.

In this week’s Faculty Learning Corner Challenge we’d like to see what YOU are using to establish your online persona.
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Tech Tuesday – Sept 22

Today’s Tech Tuesday introduces you to the Google Chrome extension ‘Search the Current Site’. This simple toolbar button allows you to search all the pages of a website, not just the page you are on.

Search any site you’re on by the simple click of a button. The search is done not only on the 1 page you are viewing at the time you click as [Ctrl]+[F] does but instead Google is used to “site search” within ALL pages of the site. Search websites the easy way!

search tool

Right click on the extension and you can customize these options:

customize options

Chrome users can add the extension from the Chrome Web Store. For Firefox users, you can install the add-on from Mozilla’s Add-Ons page.

Congratulations to Math Trafton, our FLC Banner Challenge Winner!

America’s voted, well, perhaps that’s a bit of a streeeeeetchhhhh. But the votes are in and tallied and congratulations go to all of our participants for enriching their student Blackboard course sites with these creative banners. And, special congratulations to Math Trafton for winning our first ever FLC Banner Challenge! You’ll be hearing from us shortly Math.

Math Trafton Banner Winner

First impressions are important so having a course banner is a great way to make a good first impression. But that’s not all. What about your sense of presence? How do you create an online persona so your students feel like they know you and are connected with the course and their learning? SPOILER ALERT!!! 

During the next two weeks we’d like you to share with us ways that you insert yourself into the online classroom. You might want to read Rob Kelly’s Creating a Sense of Instructor Presence in the Online Classroom to get some ideas on ways you can increase your persona, your social presence and your instructional presence. Stay tuned for the opening of our next faculty challenge, coming soon!