Activity 7: Assessment/Polling & Data Gathering Part 1

I created the following two assessment tools:

Poll Everywhere Cell Organelles Self-Evaluation Poll 

Kahoot Mindsets Quiz

I like that the poll everywhere can be accessed in a lot of different ways (website, text, twitter).  It would be great for an end of class or beginning of class poll to see where everyone is or to figure out what the big questions are when you don't want something to take a long time and just are interested in a quick and easy response of the majority.  I also like that the answers can be short text and anonymous.  Sometimes kids have questions on the homework and they might not want to ask because they are embarrassed.  This allows them to be anonymous.  Additionally, if we didn't have time to go over all the questions I could just poll them and figure out which are the most crucial to hit.


I have already used Kahoot in class a few times.  I, personally, like the competitive aspect of the program, but also feel like it turns some students off.  I have used Kahoot to review for a test or follow-up on information that we covered the previous day.  I think the data that is provided from kahoot is great for teacher interpretation and I have used it on-the-spot to clear up misconceptions and re-teach material when a majority of the students to not meet proficiency.  

Activity 5: Apps, Add-ons, & Extensions, Oh My!

The first app I downloaded is Lucid Chart.  It is a diagramming and flow charting app.  In biology a lot of what we discuss in class are processes.  I think it could be cool to have students use an easy app like this to create a flow chart or diagram like this.

Creating it took me under 5 minutes, so I would anticipate it taking the students about 15 because they would have to think about how they wanted to display the information first.  I also found the add-on Lucid Diagrams which opens up Lucid in your google docs.  That is handy because it automatically shows you all of your diagrams and allows you to drag and drop them in.  I can see this being handing in a google classroom assignment where you ask groups of students or individuals to all post their ideas to one document.  This app unlike some of the other diagramming apps does allow multiple people to edit it at once, just like a google doc.

The only hiccup I had was a lot of extra white space on my images.  That was quickly solved when I found the "crop to content" button.


The other app that I can see using a lot is probably considered very lame, but in the world of science labs and not wanting kids on their cell phones constantly it would be essential.  It is called, Timer Tab.  It is an incredibly easy to use timer and would be great to have easy access to on the chromebooks while students are working on their labs that need to be timed in any way.  It has 3 settings that you can see in the image below (countdown, alarm clock and stopwatch).