Nik Peachey is back with the third post from his series on digital teaching skills, this time taking a look at ‘crowdsourcing’ and the online tools you can use to use for this.
As teachers we frequently promote ourselves in our modern role as facilitators rather than knowledge owners and yet when we get into the classroom so much of what we do tends to be telling rather than asking. Crowdsourcing information is about doing the opposite. It’s about collecting information from the room and beyond and enabling our students to share what they already know and develop their knowledge together.I use a number of tools to crowdsource including Typeform and Survey Monkey but one of my favourite tools for this is Tricider.
Tricider enables me to create a single question topic and then collect ideas in a very structured and interactive way. The tool has three main columns; the first to enable students to share ideas, the second to enable them to add pros and cons of each idea and the final third column allows them to vote for the best ideas. I’ve used this tool for a number of activities both in the classroom and for teacher training and research. Here is an example questionnaire that I used with teachers based around the key question: How do you promote and encourage creativity in your classroom?
Debates and discursive essays
I can set up a topic question such as “How can we encourage the use of more renewable energy sources?” and collect students ideas. As they contribute ideas they can start to comment on each others’ suggestions and add in pros and cons, then they can vote for the best ideas. They can then use the collective information for a live class debate or pull out what they feel are the most significant points to write up into an essay.
Sharing resources
I can set up a questionnaire to allow them to share their favourite sites for learning English. They can research each others’ contributions and add in some of the pros and cons of each resource before voting on the ones they think are most useful.
Planning an event
I can ask them for suggestions when planning a real or imaginary trip. They can share their suggestions and use the pros and cons section to argue for and against different options before voting on the best ones. Once students have complete a few of these crowdsourcing questionnaires I can encourage them to create their own and use them to collect information from their peers or through their social network connections. Crowdsourcing, plus my suggestions for using backchannels and collaborative digital writing tasks, are just a few tools and suggestions for tasks and activities that we can use to keep our students’ digital devices busy, and to keep them engaged through both their physical and digital channels of communication during our classes.
We hope you find these useful and if you’re interested in more related to digital teaching development, make sure to check out The Cambridge English Digital Framework for Language Teachers.