USING POLLS WITH STUDENTS

Let’s talk about POLLS. 

A poll is a survey used to give a public opinion about a specific topic or question. Using a poll with in your class allows you to ask one multiple choice question and receive results which will reflect how other students feel about a particular subject.  Nowadays, most polls are being asked online.  An online poll tool gives you the opportunity to receive instant information or feedback from other students in your class.  You can use create polls to use on your computer or on any device such as a smartphone, ipod or ipad.

Some easy sites to make polls are:

1.      http://www.polldaddy.com/
2.    http://www.polleverywhere.com/
3.       http://www.surveymonkey.com/
4.       http://pollcode.com/
5.       http://www.polljunkie.com/
6.       http://newpoll.net/

Look at this example.





Let students control some of their own learning by giving them the opportunity to be active and  feel that they are the 'creator' of learning activities such as this one!

WORDSIFT

Here is a tool I came across that I think could be useful for teachers working  on reading skills.  I think it could best be used by the teacher with the whole class, projecting the text in question using the OHP and working on the text as a group activity.  As well as working on reading skills, teachers are introducing key vocabulary in a visual way which facilitates comprehension, esp. in a foreign language.

Wordsift visualizes texts and picks out the most frequent words used.  Wordsift also does a google image search and retrieves images to match the two most frequent words found. Examples from the source text containing the most frequent word in the text is displayed under the Visual Thesaurus word web.  One intended use of this feature is to organize the text to preview key vocabulary.