Crowd-sourcing Your Classroom (Google Tip #3)

"Crowd-sourcing" as it is becoming defined is really a means to increase interactivity and participation by all participants.  It is the idea that the "crowd" (i.e. audience, students, etc...) have meaningful contributions to add to the discussion while the discussion is going on.

At conferences I have been attending lately, Twitter has been the back channel of choice for making comments, asking questions, or sharing information.  Normally, adding the hashtag (#wemta2012, for example) for the event aggregates all the relevant comments.  

For your classroom, however, where Twitter is generally not available to students, I highly recommend trying Google Moderator.

President Obama used Moderator for Open Questions and Answers

As an instructor, you set up a series of questions from the general to the specific and your students are able to make comments and ask questions in real-time...even during class-time.  The normal question I get from teachers is "Isn't this distracting?"  

Well...no.

What do you do when you get lost during a lesson, miss a key piece of information...You ask your neighbor.  This is more distracting because it involves more than just you, as well as drawing the ire of the presenter or teacher.  With the opportunity to "post" your question to Moderator DURING the lesson, it allows other students or the instructor to go over the question immediately without disturbance.

The other awesome benefit of Moderator is that it allows participants to "vote" on other people's questions. Unlike Survivor, the most voted-for questions go to the top (American Idol, right?).  This helps prioritize Q&A sessions, information that needs to be reviewed or concepts misunderstood.

Possible Uses:

• Back channel during instructional times/lectures
• Questions for clarification after reading, either in class or at home.  Literature circles, whole-class readings, readings for further information...this is an excellent chance for students to post follow-up details and questions as well as prioritize.
• Use a Flipped Classroom model and have students generate questions from their reading/instructional lessons (e.g. Khan videos, etc...).  This will drive your agenda for the following day.
• So many others...

Here is a sample to check out PLUS the responses.

Google Moderator is also iPad friendly...as are all Google Products.