AnswerGarden is a new tool that you can use in the classroom for barinstorming or getting feedback. You don’t have to sign up, but when you create a poll or a question to think. The website asks you to put a password on it and then you can decide how long it will be open. Once you’ve created the page you can post it in a tweet or embed it on your website or blog to use. You can only write 20 characters, that means, some phrases, words, or chunks.
When you think the answers are enough, you can export it to Wordle or Tagxedo or even get the QR code for the page.makes the tool I really loved the idea of getting a quick word cloud after finishing your brainstorming.
For a presentation that we will deliver today, we made a quick research yesterday and asked our FB and twitter friends to respond a question and the result was amazing.
I think it’s designed for brainstorming mainly but you can use it in many ways in EFL classes:
1. You can ask your students to remember the words you studied together. If you’re using a smart board, you can ask then to come to the board and write a word that they feel they learned. If you’re using iPads or other BYOD, you can ask them to do it at the same time.
2. You can ask them list the words that they think they can not use comfortably and then put the word cloud on the walls so that you can study later.
3. Instead of asking a question you can write the topic and ask them to brainstorm.
4. When you read a story, novel or watch a film, you can ask your students to describe one of the character adding an adjective one by one in groups , maybe.
I’d like to know your ideas as well.
I think AnswerGarden will be in my favourite tools list for the next academic year.
created using Tagxedo
http://www.tagxedo.com/artful/580efc58c9464ba2