As teachers begin to delve deeper into their first unit of inquiry, many of you have expressed an interest in having people from all over the world weigh in on the things you and your students are studying. There are many ways to do this, but, for this posting, I'm going to focus on a quick and easy way that you can have hundreds of people from all over the world answer the questions that you and your students have. ask500people.com is a website that allows you to develop questions and provides a forum for people from across the world to answer!
After creating a free account, you will be able to easily post a question for the rest of the world to answer. After clicking the green "create question" button, you will see a screen that looks like this:
You and your students will be able to enter a question and select what type of answer they want participants to use. After creating a question, it will be available for anyone on ask500people.com to view. When viewing your question, you can copy the url and paste it on your Facebook page, blog, Twitter, etc. for friends and family members to answer.
When viewing the answers to your question you will see a screen that looks like this:
You will be able to click on the tabs on the top of this page to see how people answered your question, where those people are from, gender, age, income, etc.
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Results as seen on "Map" tab |
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Results as seen in the "Overview" tab Using "Ask 500 People" may also enable you to bring math, which is often a stand alone subject area, into your unit of inquiry. Reading graphs, studying percentages, statistics- the possibilities are endless! *One caution when using this website. You may find it beneficial to have your students answering questions that others have posted. Just make sure that you search for the questions and have them ready to go ahead of time. As far as I know, there are no security settings on this site, so there may be questions listed that are not appropriate for students to view. I hope some of you will find this tool useful and I look forward to hearing how you are using it! Each week, I would like to feature one web 2.0 tool that you may find useful as you and your students explore your unit of inquiry. We each have different levels of comfort when it comes to technology. My hope is that I can help spark an idea of something new to try with kids. If you need help with the technology piece, I am happy to help (or I will refer you to our lovely district technology coach). My first featured web 2.0 tool is something that many of us have used...  In the past 2 weeks, I have used Google Maps to navigate myself around Chicago, South Bend, Des Moines and (I'll be honest) Omaha! Google Maps can be so much more than a navigational tool for adults with a poor sense of direction. Below are some possible ways that Google Maps could be used in your classroom.
The list of possibilities is endless. If using Google Maps in your current unit of inquiry makes sense, I encourage you to try it. If not, keep the idea in mind for another unit. Remember that you can always go back and add student experiences to your planner. Have you used Google Maps either in your classroom or personally? I'd love for people to post comments below! Does this little patch of land seen on Google Maps look familiar??? |
