Happy New Year! This post is a
little overdue but the latter part of 2014 was absolutely manic, with the
busiest Autumn Term I’ve ever experienced, and finishing off my Postgraduate
Certificate in Academic Practice (PgCAP) on top of that. However lots of us
will still be teaching this term so hopefully it’s not too late in the academic
year to be talking about classroom tools.
My institution has had access to
Textwall for a little while, and last term I decided to give it a go
myself. It’s a tool which allows
students to text in answers to or comments on a question that the teacher poses
on the screen. Numbers are not stored and it’s anonymous, so students can
comment without it being attributed to them, which I thought might be an
advantage in getting students to “speak up” in sessions.
I first tried it in some seminars
that I ran for one of my first year cohorts, kicking off the session by putting
a question up about what concerned them about the topics we were looking at
that day (using library resources, referencing and plagiarism), and asking them
to text in their answers. I had no idea what kind of response I would get, but
actually in every session I received lots of answers (with referencing and
avoiding plagiarism being the main concern!), more than I have in the past when
I’ve tried asking a similar thing verbally. The students seemed surprised at
being asked to get out their phones and text, but I think that element of
surprise encouraged engagement. It was really useful for me to get an overview
of what the class was thinking too, and it provided a reference point for me to
return to at the end of the session, to check with the students that we had
covered everything. I could see how
Textwall could potentially be a great tool for gauging student understanding in
a similar way; asking a question and being able to see the general response
from the class – if a large number were misunderstanding something, for
example, that would be a sign for me to go back over that thing.
I therefore tried it again with a
different first year group, asking questions about what we had covered during the
session. I had reservations about whether to go ahead with it as the group had
been difficult, with a few disruptive students, but decided to try it anyway;
it didn’t really work. After several questions along the lines of “Miss, is
this your phone number?”, when I eventually persuaded them to text responses, I
got mostly silly ones. I learnt from
this that it’s really important to gauge a group before using it mid-session
(not so easy to do so if you’re using it at the start though).
I think Textwall can be really
useful in the classroom, but it is important to remember that there may be
inclusivity issues i.e. students who don’t have a phone, or who have
pay-as-you-go and will have to pay for the text message, so it’s not the only
way we should be attempting to check understanding. And then there’s the
problem of students using it to be “funny” or disruptive - you need to think in
advance how you will deal with offensive or silly comments. I will definitely be continuing to explore the
potential uses of Textwall though.
