On the 3rd of May we ran our first SASS Innovators Lunch. Jayne Morgan, Senior Lecturer in Diagnostic Radiography, School of Health Sciences presented on the effective use of Poll Everywhere in face-to-face teaching and shared with us her top tips on how to use it to enhance student learning.
SASS Innovators lunch it’s a new initiative for School Arts and Social Sciences created to provide more opportunities for staff to share best practices in teaching, discuss pedagogic approaches to use of educational technologies and exchange ideas.
Our Poll Everywhere Innovator’s Lunch for SASS staff ran today with great advice from Jayne Morgan, thanks to all who attended @CityUniLEaD pic.twitter.com/tXtIVQiIRz
— Fariha Afgan (@FarihaAfgan) May 3, 2017
For those of you who don’t know what PollEverywhere is – it is an interactive response tool for live audiences which allows you to create polls and see the results in real-time, it is available to all City staff. Link to the guides
Jayne’s presentation showed how Poll Everywhere can be used to help build student confidence, address knowledge gaps and make large-group lectures more interactive. She talked about how easy it is to misunderstand the comprehension of students. She encourages her students to work together with a smartphone or tablet to enable them to answer anonymously. But importantly for Jayne, she can then see which topics they struggle with. She provided a lot of useful tips that stimulated much discussion. These included:
- Group your questions into topics when creating pools. It’s easier to manage questions, duplicate and reuse them.
- Although students love it, do not overuse Poll Everywhere. Plan to use it on selected sessions. It helped Jayne to make her revision sessions more interactive as involved majority of students.
- Register your students when you are using the data for research purpose or learning analytics to see student progression.
- Set the ground rules before using it in the class – no silly answers allowed.
- Provide encouragement when they get the answers correct.
- Start by using simple style questions.
- Select “Cluster style” answers to open-ended questions / MCQs.
- Allow at least 30 seconds before showing responses, but don’t wait too long as students may get frustrated.
- Don’t ask too many questions in one go.
- Allow time to go over topics in detail to minimise misunderstanding.
- Ask a few questions at the start/end of a lecture.
- Before a revision, class ask students open-ended questions on what they would like more information on.
- Always prepare questions in advance of the session and test your questions.
- Relevance Google Chrome / Website only if poor phone signal.
If you would like to speak at one of the SASS Innovators Lunch events then please email James Rutherford (School Relationship Lead) at james.rutherford@city.ac.uk
