Mobile Learning

Poll Everywhere is a very good tool for instantly being able to get feedback from your students.  I really enjoyed the way that this site is set up and how the tool supposedly works.  I say supposedly because since I don't have a classroom of my own I wasn't able to test it out in a real environment.  However if I did have my own classroom I have several ideas for integrating this technology in the classroom.  One technique that I used during my teaching internship was a quick write.  This was something that students would do at the end of a lesson that would allow me to see what students understood the material covered and which parts students still weren't understanding.  I would read these at the end of everyday and tweak my lesson plans accordingly.  It would save me a lot of time if I could get this feedback instantly.  I would also do this polling about 10 minutes before I wanted the lesson to end that way for the last 10 minutes I could cover any areas of difficulty.  If all students understood the content then I could cut those last 10 minutes and move on.  It would allow for the teaching in the class to be much more targeted on what the students need to know and what the already know.  It would help with pacing and keeping students engaged.

As with any tool you want to implement in your classroom though there will always be challenges that you will have to overcome.  The most obvious challenge I see is that fact that cellphones are not allowed in many schools, especially elementary.  This would obviously cause a hindrance in the effectiveness of this tool.  Another obstacles would be the fact that not all students would have cellphones and therefore be able to participate in these types of polls.  As with most things in an ideal situation this tool would be great but most of us don't live or work in an ideal situation for implementing these technologies.  This is why teachers need to be creative to figure out solutions to these types of problems.  I think this has great potential to increase the power and effectiveness of education and I would really love to see this implemented in classrooms.