http://answergarden.ch/
What is it?
Answer garden is a simple response tool that allows you to create open ended questions and receive feedback from students. “Oh so this is like todaysmeet or socrative right?” Well, no not really. With Todaysmeet, you can create an instant chatroom and with socrative you can create multiple response activities for students. With answergarden, you can create one open ended question at a time and students can simply type responses to your question and see their responses appear in a word cloud. Students can respond as many times as they want, but can only type responses that are not longer than 20 characters.
How does it work?
Using answergarden is very easy and you don’t need to create an account to use it. Students don’t need have a username or password either.
Implication for the classroom
While this is not a discussion board, or chat tool, it is a useful tool for warm up activities. It can also be used as a nice brainstorming tool and simple polling tool. A nice idea could be that students have to type one nice adjective to describe a classmate or teacher. Another idea is that you could ask students to type in an adjective, noun, or part of speech for language review. When learning about states, students can type in attributes associated with that particular states. You could also use this tool to gauge how students are feeling about lesson content or how they are feeling at a particular time of the day.
Ah, sometimes the KISS(Keep It Simple Smartie) method, works best! This is definitely a tool that is simple to use, and provides another way to get feedback from your students. It is engaging, and also allows for every student's voice to be heard(yes, even those shy, quiet students that hate speaking up in class) Happy snacking!