Remember SurveyMonkey?

There was a time at SBP, when Rich Lorenzo taught Newark Studies, when students became adept at using an online tool called Survey Monkey.  Checking to see, that provider still exists and continues to offer the ability to easily and quickly create polls/surveys/voting and all for free.  (Several limitations to the free account).  I bring up Survey Monkey because of its similarity to Collaborize Classroom.


In an earlier post, I spoke about a provider called Collaborize Classroom, which offers free sites for teachers and schools to do something similar to Survey Monkey, but with the goal of promoting discussion of the issue being polled, as opposed to just tallying up the votes.  Collaborize Classroom offers the ability, and here is the reason for the 'collaborize' in its name, for the participants to write comments about the issue being polled.

Collaborize Classroom may eventually be an important tool that teachers at SBP could use to promote discussions that exist and continue beyond the physical classroom.  Can this be a substitute for blogging?  I am a little reluctant to say yes, because although the comment composed by student-responders is a form of writing, it might not offer enough possibilities to thoughtfully compose a 'proficient' blog entry.  Eventually, if several teachers decide to use Collaborize Classrooms, the discussions from those polls might become seeds for higher-quality writing in student blogs.

The website for Collaborize Classroom provided some terrific resources that teachers could use to begin classroom discussions.  These resources are offered for free (albeit, they request an email address before one can read all of them) and contain provocative ideas that can be transferred to blogging as prompts.  I mention this as a result of another topic that Fr. Albert and I discussed during our meeting yesterday: what ideas do can be used to provoke our students to write blog entries?  Fr. Al and I talked about how students can be invited to make text-to-text, text-to-self, or text-to-world connections between what they will be reading in the "Wisdom of Benedict" course.  I also mentioned to him that I had seen other 'icebreakers' that promote blogging.  These 'icebreakers' are described in the resources at Collaborize Classroom.

Here's a list of the resources:  "Creative Writing Prompts, 5 Activities with Collaborize Classroom, 5 C's of Successful Peer Editing, 8 Intriguing Strategies to Continue the Discussion, 8 Online Icebreakers I, 8 Online Icebreakers II, 10-Step Research Paper, Adding Widgets to Collaborize Classroom, Art Of Asking Questions, Challenge-Based Learning Template, Consent Form, Do's And Don'ts For Student Forums, Examples Of Strong Sentence Starters, Facilitation Guide For Students, Formulating Strong Questions, Help Students Avoid Mechanical Missteps For English Teachers, Inviting Students, Online Student Conduct Code, Rethinking Your Role, Say Something Substantial, Student Guide: Art of Asking Questions, Weaving Online Discussions Into The Classroom" It's quite a list, and the pdf versions are found here.

There's some doing that's required to be able to see all these pdfs, but I managed to get all of them and read through most of the excellent ideas.  I think of them not just as discussion 'prompts' but also as blog prompts.

I am so intrigued by the ideas and the design of Collaborize Classroom that I will make plans to use this tool in the "History of Science" course this upcoming First Term.