ClassKick

Getting Feedback via ClassKick

One app I started using in my classroom this year is ClassKick.  I heard about this app a while back but I was reintroduced to it during some summer professional development training.  This program allows me to enter an assignment and then view my students' work.  The students can raise a virtual hand in order to get help or to ask the instructor to check an answer.  I have used this app before several of my summative assessments this year in order to give students more time to get help and receive feedback on their work.  Generally, I will run a "ClassKick" session on the night before a unit summative assessment for an hour or so.  These sessions haven't been as highly attended by students as I had initially hoped for, but I believe the students who attended got some much-needed one-on-one attention and were able to ask questions in order to gain a better understanding of the concepts we had been learning about in class.

With our most recent summative assessment, I tried to kick it up a notch.  Early in the week I had my students choose a problem to work on.  The students created a video using Explain Everything in order to walk us through the problem-solving process.  The students then uploaded these videos to YouTube and shared them in a Google Document.  I was able to take these videos and attach them to our summative review in ClassKick.  While students were working on the review and got stuck, they could view the video created by their classmates.  We had essentially created a class library of problem-solving strategies for the main concepts that we had talked about in class.  If students were still stuck on the problem, then they could raise their hand and get additional assistance.

I know there is also a feature in ClassKick that allows students to be able to work together and answer questions without solely relying on the teachers' expertise.  This is something that I would like to explore in future review sessions.