Engage Students in Informed Decision Making

With access to an abundance of online resources, students can become informed decision makers and stakeholders in their own learning.  Use of online polls, surveys, and digital tools for collecting feedback can turn passive observers into active participants. 

The ThingLink Teacher Challenge this week asked educators to explore the use of an interactive image for informing and collecting feedback from an audience. We introduced Polldaddy as an integrated tool for the task. Polldaddy is an excellent choice because rich-media tags support embedding of a poll into an interactive image, allowing the poll to pop up without leaving the page. Of course, there are many web tools available for collecting feedback and any of those tools can be linked to a ThingLink interactive image.

Examples of Using ThingLink for Informed Decision Making

Participants self-published their interactive images on the Padlet wall linked below. Many participants chose to create interactive images to share tech tools and collect feedback about popular choices, which makes the images particularly useful for teachers as we approach the start of the school year. I hope you will explore the Padlet and watch it grow as more participants add images. There is a wealth of expertise here!

Final Thoughts

As we kick off a new school year I encourage teachers to consider creating activities to inform students and collect feedback as alternative to traditional homework assignments. Completing this type of activity prior to class can maximize instructional time and it is certainly more interesting than a worksheet. Just think about the possibilities that exist with ThingLink and tools for collecting feedback!