Edtech Thursday!
Every Thursday I highlight a web 2.0 tool to use with your class.
I’m a little late this week with edtech thursday. I had a busy day with a whole bunch of things going on. Anyway, I thought I would continue with looking at web2.0 graphing and survey tools.
I was originally introduced to a neat tool called Zoomerang a few years ago. Unfortunately, they have gone to a more fee based model. There are some aspects of it that are still free 
but it has sort of lost it’s appeal to me as a tool. One tool I have started using is Free Website Polls (www.free-web-site-polls.com). It is a nice and easy poll creator. It’s not fancy which is part of its appeal. Once the poll is created you can publish it to your blog, either on the side bar or within the blog itself. Anothernice thing is that you can only vote once. Clicking on one of the selections willtake to the results page where you can see the results.
So, how do we include this in our class?
Well, first of all, there are so many connections to math. You could set this up with students and get other schools participating. Our class will set one up on the class blog and collect data on favorite subjects. We will then use the Rich Chart Live to post the results on the blog. You could do this with any subject. For Language Arts, you could use it as a way to predict what will happen in a next part of a book you are reading. You could also have a book contest where you have students reading a selection of books and poll which book is the class favorite. Students could then do reviews of the book stating why it was their favorite, posting those answers to the blog.
