On the Edge of their Seats: Using polls, backchannels, and games in student response systems to create durable student engagement

Last month I delivered a presentation at Educator Day 2014 for the Diocese of Phoenix Catholic schools.  I wanted to convey that with so many student response systems available for free, teachers always have a way to give students a voice during each and every lesson.  The presentation below, "On the Edge of their Seats: Using polls, backchannels, and games in student response systems to create durable student engagement," provides case uses for the following edtech tools:

1. PollEverywhere
2. TodaysMeet
3. Socrative
4. Kahoot!

UPDATE: These tools change frequently. Since this presentation, PollEverywhere, for example, has added a "discourse" feature that allows students to see each other's free responses and "up" or "down" vote them (like on Reddit).

Use Storify to capture a retrospective of your professional development timeline from Twitter

Today I realized that Storify could be used to represent a timeline of my professional development activities on Twitter.  Since my school requires a teacher portfolio that tracks classroom goals, teacher observations, technology implementation, student evaluations, etc., I think the addition of a timeline of the semester's PD goings-on would supplement the portfolio nicely.  By viewing the last several months of my posts on Twitter related to NoRedInk, Membean, Socrative, PollEverywhere, I can see how I've connected with other educators and developed relationships with edtech companies.

With easy account creation, Storify allows users to curate a retrospective of the Web, and I simply entered my @MrJohnDamaso Twitter handle and was presented with a stream of my Tweets and Retweets. I loaded a few hundred of them and captured them as a Storify that I can easily insert into my portfolio, Tweet out, or include here.