Let students speak freely!! by Thanos Hatziapostolou

Did you ever need feedback from students? Their ideas, suggestions or questions on an issue, task or a topic that you covered? I am sure that you have. We know that students in general are on the shy side and not willing to ask a question or say something in the classroom. And certainly there is no time for all students to speak. So, what do we tell them: ‘take out a piece of paper and anonymously write x, y or z.’ ... Paper? “Ah this? …. Last year!”. It’s actually “tragic” to use last century’s techniques. :) Αnd, what if we wanted students to express themselves outside the classroom? Are there any tools to enable students to ‘speak’ anonymously? Yes, there are.

Online Tool #1: Padlet

Padlet is an online bulletin board (forum) where students can ‘pin’ a sticky note. A note can include text, images, videos, files etc. Commenting on notes is of course possible so a Padlet can also be used as a collaborative tool. And every post or comment is anonymous. There are SO MANY WAYS that Padlet can be used. Here are 32 ideas. I have personally used Padlet to: 1) collect anonymous feedback from students about my classes (suggestions, ideas, what they like or not like etc.) and 2) enable students to curate interesting online material relevant to the class. By the way, in the classroom, it works great! For outside the classroom you need to find ways for students to participate. That’s a challenge with all online tools (except maybe Facebook). Just putting Padlet link in a MOLE website is not enough. What does Padlet look like? Here is one example and here is another one. Finally, a video of using Padlet in Higher Education.

Online Tool #2: AnswerGarden

AnswerGarden is “a minimal tool for maximum feedback” as their motto says. It is a student response tool that allows you to present a question or topic to a group, gather anonymous responses and display them. This tool can be used as an effective brainstorming, polling, discussion, and icebreaking tool in and out of the classroom. While not as powerful as Padlet, since it is not collaborative and you can only post text, the very useful feature of AnswerGarden is that it displays responses as a ‘WordCloud’. So, what does it look like? It’s minimal as you can see. But very powerful. I used AnswerGarden to gather students’ opinions on a new feedback method that I introduced this semester. It worked like a charm! Here is also a short video explaining how to use AnswerGarden.

Both tools are super easy to set up and use, but they do offer many settings (privacy, number of responses, aesthetics etc.) that can meet most needs. Needless to say, they are free.

I hope that you will find these tools useful.

Thanos Hatziapostolou

Senior Lecturer, CSD