This past September I presented on a conference panel focusing on increasing student engagement through media and technology. While there are many technologies well suited for these goals, two platforms have received little attention within higher education, but have tremendous possibilities to enhance instructional practices and engage students. PollEverywhere and SearchTeam are two web-based technologies that are institutive, easy to use, and have countless applications inside and outside of the classroom. The best part, they’re free! A detailed explanation follows below.
Poll Everywhere – Overview (www.polleverywhere.com)
On the surface, Poll Everywhere is a simple application that works well for live audiences using mobile devices like smartphones. People participate by visiting a fast mobile-friendly web page for your event, sending text messages, or using Twitter. Instructions are displayed on-screen. The poll that is embedded within the presentation or web page will update in real time. Advanced uses include texting comments to a presentation, texting questions to a presenter, web voting, and SMS interactivity in print, radio, and TV.
Participants may vote by following the instructions shown on the poll when it is displayed. The poll does not need to be displayed to actively receive votes, but it does need to be "started" by the presenter on the edit poll page. In the US, you send a text message to the number 22333 that contains a voting keyword, like 1234, or blue.
Additionally, individuals may also vote via your poll's web page on Poll Everywhere, via an embeddable voting widget, on a phone's web browser using PollEv.com, or via Twitter.
In short, Poll Everywhere is a useful tool to provide real-time feedback and also facilitates interactive presentations. It is well suited for small classrooms or large lecture halls.
SearchTeam – Overview (www.searchteam.com)
SearchTeam is a collaborative search engine. However, this platform offers many more advantages over traditional search engines for individuals and groups.
To start with, you can use SearchTeam to efficiently research the Web for information. You start your research by creating a SearchSpace on a topic of interest. From within a SearchSpace, you can search the Web, videos, images, books and more. You can find and save only what you want while you are searching and throw away what you don't want or find irrelevant. You can automatically organize what you save into folders of your choosing. Everything is automatically saved into your personal account and you can return to your searches any time and continue from where you were previously.
What makes SearchTeam unique and valuable is that you can do your searches collaboratively with others you trust, such as friends, colleagues and family members. You can invite any set of people you trust to search with you from within a SearchSpace. An invitation is sent via email to those people you invite to join your search. When they enter your SearchSpace, they see exactly what you've found and saved so far. They can comment on or like your findings. They can chat with you from within the SearchSpace, and do further searches relevant to that topic and save more results into the SearchSpace. All changes made by any collaborator are relayed to all other collaborators in real-time, so everyone is instantly in sync with what others are doing.
In addition to finding and saving search results, SearchTeam goes further to enable you to enrich your SearchSpace with knowledge that may come from other sources. You can upload documents to a SearchSpace to share your relevant reports / presentations, etc. You can also add links to Web resources that you may have received from others via email or social networks. You can even
create new posts to share your knowledge on the topic directly inside the SearchSpace.
Together, as a team, you can leverage the collective effort to find good quality information, and benefit from the collective knowledge on any topic efficiently.
In effect, SearchTeam is traditional Web searching + Wiki-like editing and saving capabilities + integration with your trusted circle of people through social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter + real-time collaboration with people you trust. What this delivers to you is a new and more effective way of using the Web to find, save, organize, share and leverage collective knowledge
through people you trust.
For more information contact Clinton Brown via email: clbrown3@eiu.edu.
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