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Make Your Next Lesson, Presentation, or Meeting More Interactive

by Diana Benner
written by Diana Benner

Would you like to make your next lesson, presentation, or meeting more interactive and give everyone an equal chance to participate? If you answered “yes,” then you’ll want to try Sli.do. Sli.do is an audience engagement tool that allows you to crowd source questions or provide polls.

How It Works

Here’s how Sli.do works:

  1. Go to Sli.do and sign up for a free account.
  2. Create an event. The event can be a presentation you are doing or a meeting you are having. It could it even be a classroom lesson you are teaching.
  3. Name the event and enter a start and end date.
  4. Create the event and then you’ll be able to crowd source questions or create polls.
    • To crowd source questions, click on Go To Questions and give your audience the URL, which is http://slido.com and the code, which begins with a hashtag (#). The code can always be changed by clicking on the name of your event. Your audience can ask questions anonymously or they can enter their name. This feature of Sli.do reminds me a lot of Google Slides Q&A.
    • To create a poll, click on Create a Poll and then select the type of poll you would like to give. You can choose from Multiple Choice, Open Text, Word Cloud, or Rating. Once you create your poll, make sure you activate it. Your audience can answer the poll by going to the same URL, which is http://slido.com and entering the code for your event.
interactive

My Favorite Interactive Features

I created a meeting event to test this tool out and it was incredibly easy to set it up. It provides you with an overview of how many active users are logged into your event, how many questions have been asked in order of popularity, and how many poll votes have been taken. In addition, an infographic can be created from the results, which can then be shared or embedded.

Another thing I liked was the Word Cloud poll. I’ve always been a fan of word clouds, so I was excited when I saw this as a feature. As the audience enters words, the size of the word changes dynamically depending on how many times your attendees submit it. I can see this working well with one-worded or short responses, which can then be easily displayed on screen.

Lastly, I love the brainstorming option, which you can read more about below.

Brainstorm Ideas

I have always been a fan of brainstorming. It is a great way to collect different viewpoints and encourage critical thinking. It also helps with team building. There is a feature in Sli.do, called Ideas, currently in beta, that allows for brainstorming.

To turn this on, click on the name of your event and then click on Features. From here, you can toggle the switch to turn this on. When you do, you will see a new Ideas tab appear. From here, you can create a topic about which you want your audience to brainstorm. Once the ideas start coming in, you can star them, highlight them, or even respond to them.

What You Get For Free

Sli.do can be used for free. With the free account, you can crowd source questions with up to 1000 audience members per event. You can have up to three polls per event. For brainstorming, you can create one topic per event. In addition, you can change the hashtag code for your event.

Unfortunately, the free version doesn’t let you change the privacy settings. Therefore, your event will be public until the date you set for the event to end. In addition, another thing to note is that with the free version, you can’t moderate incoming questions. They will appear live as they are entered.

There are special educational plans if you want the additional features that Sli.do has to offer, such as password protecting your event and exporting event data.

Google Slide Integration

Currently, with Sli.do, there is a Switcher app you can download for Windows or Mac. This allows you to seamlessly switch between your PowerPoint or Keynote and Sli.do. Google Slide integration is coming soon. If you want to take advantage of early access to the Sli.do add-on for Slides, sign up here.

Get Started with More Interaction

As you get started with Sli.do, you might want to review these handy tips. They will really help you have a good experience with using Sli.do and will help you get the most out of the interaction with your audience.

I would love to know what you think of Sli.do. Let me know in the comments!

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questions
Good Teaching

Who’s Asking the Questions?

by Lori Gracey
written by Lori Gracey

I saw a recent statistic that startled me. Teachers ask more than 400 questions a day (source). That’s a lot of questions! But it’s the accompanying statistic that really floored me. Ted Wragg’s 1993 research found that an average of just one spontaneous question each lesson came from the students, and that was more likely to do with procedure than with learning (source). So the “experts” who already know the content matter appear to own the learning as they control what questions are asked about it. That just doesn’t make sense!

There are a million reasons why students don’t display more curiosity in class. We’ve trained them to passively wait for the information we want them to have; they’re afraid of looking stupid in front of their peers; they don’t care about the content enough to ask; and more. That doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the students should be directing the learning by trying to find answers to THEIR questions about the content. Which means that THEY need to be asking the questions!

In the Old Days

questionsIn the past, good teachers tried to get students more curious about the learning by having them complete a KWL chart. At the beginning of a new unit, this chart has a student make a list of what he already KNOWS about the topic, what he WANTS to learn about it, and then, after the unit is over, what he LEARNED.

While this was a good first step, it didn’t go far enough. And usually, once the first two sections were completed, the student didn’t look at the chart again until the unit was over. More importantly, the teacher often didn’t look at the questions the students had about the content or make changes to the teaching and learning activities based on those questions. So it became a pointless activity.

How to Get Students to Question

Today, we see the re-emphasis on student curiosity popping up in the maker movement and in Genius/Passion Hour. These educational trends show that, as educators, we recognize that students should be driving the learning and that this happens through the questions that they have about the content. So what can we do to get them more actively and continually question what they are learning?

  1. Before starting any new unit of study, show a short teaser video to get students started thinking about the content. YouTube is your friend here!
  2. Then break them into small groups (2 to 3 students per group) to brainstorm things that they want to know. Please note that the first few times you do this activity, the questions will be few and fairly limited. Questioning is an active skill that requires lots of practice to master. To help them practice, give them topics that are of great interest to them (like the latest action film, a new musical group, or a nearby attraction) and have them brainstorm questions they would like to ask about those topics.
    1. Make sure they know that there are no bad questions and that everyone’s questions may be different because the learning is different for each person.
    2. Emphasize that, while some questions will be easy to find answers to, others may still be stumping experts. And that’s okay!
    3. Also, be sure to share with them questions you still have about the topic. This lets them know that questioning is a lifelong pursuit.
  3. The next step is to help students learn to prioritize their questions so that they are actively searching for the most important answers. Generally speaking, there’s simply not enough time in the school day to answer all of the questions they may have, especially once they get rolling.
  4. Post the prioritized questions somewhere where everyone can see them throughout the unit. This could be on the board, on chart paper, or digitally.
  5. As the questions are answered over time, make sure to mark them off on the list and celebrate their answers. Recognize the student(s) who discovered the answer first and have him/her share how they did it. Then give the students a chance to add another question or two that may have come up since they started studying.

Learning should be a celebration of finding the answers to the questions that each of us have individually and collectively. As educators, we need to take a more active role in the classroom in teaching students how to ask good questions and in helping them discover their own answers. That may mean that we ourselves are talking a lot less and that, in fact, there may be more silence sometimes in our classrooms as students ponder what their own questions are. And isn’t that what learning is all about?

 

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