Module 6: SRSs as Formative Assessments

The assignment for our final module was learn about and demonstrate Student Response Systems (SRS). For the first part of this assignment, we were each assigned two SRSs to learn about and later discuss with our assigned Jigsaw groups. The ones that I was assigned were Poll Everywhere (www.polleverywhere.com) and The Answer Pad (http://app.theanswerpad.com/homepage.html). 

Although I would not use Poll Everywhere too often in my own classroom, I still thought that it was a better tool to use than The Answer Pad. The first advantage of using Poll Everywhere is the accessibility it provides when you create a new presenter account. There are also multiple types of questions that you can ask with the website such as multiple choice, word clouds, short answer, clickable images, rank order, and 2X2 matrix. You can even ask different types of questions within the same presentation by selecting the survey option. As for responding, students can log into the presentation online or text their responses to the code that is provided by the website. One of the disadvantages of this website, however, is the inability to select correct responses to show students if they answered the questions correctly. This is because it is merely meant to be a poll which only records students’ responses and how many of those responses were selected. Another disadvantage for me was experiencing difficulty with creating or responding to a rank order question. Regardless of these drawbacks, this would still be a good tool to use for formative assessments as long as the teacher discuss their students’ responses. 

The Answer Pad, on the other hand, was very difficult to figure out. Although there was a section of instructional videos, there were a lot of topics that were being addressed and I was not able to select a different part of the videos to watch. Therefore, I had to try and figure out how to use the tool myself. Unfortunately, I was still unsure about how to use it because I thought that questions were supposed to be included on the Answer Sheet that I was trying to create. It was only until after I met with my group for this tool when I found out that questions are meant to be given verbally while the students answer with The Answer Pad. This was another downside for me because I personally think that students should be able to see questions as well as hear them. I was able to find some advantages, however, while my group was discussing the tool. First, there is a feature that enables students to draw out their responses. Second, you can connect with students right away and have them answer a question that you send out through a feature called Quick Connect. Finally, you can record the students’ responses and their progress through the assignments so far. Although these are helpful features that Poll Everywhere does not have, it is still confusing to use and is not very friendly for students with disabilities.

After deciding that Poll Everywhere was my favorite tool, I presented it my last Jigsaw group’s members who presented the tools Verso and GoSoapBox. At the end of our discussion, we all agreed to present GoSoapBox (https://app.gosoapbox.com/) to the rest of our class. We liked it because the questions were very easy to create and we could select correct responses for students to see if they answered correctly. The three kinds of assessments we could create were Quizzes, Polls, and Discussions. For quizzes, you can ask short answer or multiple choice questions while, the questions for polls would only have multiple options that students can select based on their own opinion. As for discussion questions, students would respond with short answers that are not meant to marked incorrect or correct. The only downside to this tool is the fact that students cannot draw their responses to questions. Other than that, I think that it can serve as a very useful formative assessment.