Saturday, February 8, 2014

Class Cards to Spark Student Conversations


Too often our students go through the school day without speaking in class. Communication and Speaking are elements of the classroom addressed in CCSS. Often as teachers we find it difficult to keep track of student participation and randomizing our student selection for participation. Class Cards is an android and iPhone app that makes tracking student participation easier. Utilize Class Cards to randomly generate a list to call on students, select a student of your choosing to respond, rate the quality of the student response instantly in your hand, view student response scores individually or as an entire class, email yourself student scores, and archive scores to view, print grade sheets, or download the data into an Excel spreadsheet. I love the idea of being able to quickly note the quality of student responses', especially for Socratic Seminars. Also, many students sit passively in a class because it has no "worth" to speak. Class Cards makes it easier for teachers to give purpose to Communicating in the classroom.