Get Students Sharing Opinions

This is a simple site with both iOS and Android apps that enables students to share and compare opinions.

Pinion has a range of images each one with a gapped sentence on. Students can complete the sentence any way they choose to share their opinions.

The opinions can also be posted through social media, so this can work well if  you have a Facebook Group too.

Once they enter their opinion students can see what other people have posted.
This is a great way to stimulate quick discussions and an idea that you can easily replicate in the classroom with images.

This site is best suited for adult learners as some of the sentences related to alcohol and other more mature topics, so be sure to check for suitability.

I hope you enjoy using Pinion with your students.

You can find 100 + more tools and resources like this in my ebook Digital Tools for Teachers - Second Edition or if you want to train other teachers to use these kinds of tools check out the Teacher Trainers’ Edition.

My Books:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

Develop Critical Thinking Skills with Kialo

Kialo is a wonderful tool for developing critical thinking skills and to develop students’ abilities to look at and explore multiple perspectives of complex issues in a clear and logical way.

The site enables teachers to set up complex topics and structure ‘pros and cons’ type debates around them.

This is simple to do. Just set up your topic, add an image and some explainer text that you want students to read first and then invite students to add either pros or cons.

You can keep your debate topics private and only allow your own students to add to them by creating teams and then sharing different discussions with the team, or once you have 15 comments you can then publish them and open them up to the public. This process of collecting a reasonable number of comments before going public helps to ensure the quality and integrity of the discussion content already on the site.

Once you have created a team you can also share any of the existing debates with your students too.

This is a great place to get your students thinking in a structured and logical way about complex topics and is a great way to prepare them for a classroom debate or discussion.

The discussions have been categorised into topics to make them easier to browse. A lot of the existing content has a very strong US bias, but there are still quite a few internationally relevant topics if you don’t want to create your own.

I hope you enjoy using Kialo and your students find it rewarding. 

 

You can find over 100 digital lesson plans, videos and teacher resources in my Teachers' Classroom App

 

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 Best

Nik Peachey

Survey Creation Tool for Students

Ask 500 People is a really simple single question survey tool. You have to register, but once you do you can make a survey in just a few minutes.
You just give your survey a name, then decide on the type of questions you want to ask.

There are four types

• Simple Yes / No
• Multiple choice answers
• Clines (degrees of agreeing vs disagreeing)
• Image select (user select one of a range of images)

One of the nice things about it is that users can leave comments if they register and so you can get information on the people who give the answers (gender, age etc.)
Perhaps what I like best of all for students though is that you can also see on a Google map where the answers came from.

This is great if you are getting students to create surveys as they will get a really genuine feeling that they are able to get opinions from around the world, which must be so much more motivating than just asking the person next to you in class.

There are also some very good, though many quite controversial, questions already up there and you could get you students discussing some of those and answering them in class and then comparing their opinions with some of those on the website and perhaps even posting their opinions (Check out the questions you use first in case their is anything offensive). Also great for doing Business English classes on market research and thinking of questions they could ask about products.

• You can see a list of 'hot' questions here.

The other nice thing is that you get a choice of embed codes to either add the survey to a site page or sidebar as well as a hyperlink you can share.


Here you can see the page widget with results and comments.

I hope you and your students enjoy it. Here you can find quiz based activities for students.

Related links:

• Create a Quick Discussion Forum
• Videos for Global Issues Lessons
• Education for the Global Economy
• Tackling political issues
• Video debating website
• Express Your Opinions

Best

Nik Peachey

Create a Quick Discussion Forum

I'm not sure how many people still use text based threaded discussion forums, but if you do, Forumotion is a pretty powerful tool with some nice features that you can use to set one up for free.

It's very quick, and you don't need any technical skills or hosting. Basically you just go to http://www.forumotion.com/, and click on 'Create a free forum'. You'll then be able to select from a range of different template designs. Once you've chosen the one you want you fill in the details of your forum and create a password. You'll then be ready to activate you forum and start using it. The best place to start in on the Administration Panel. Here you can get some tips on how to get started and how to get your forum registered with search engines etc. If you want to see what a forum can look like and try it out, there's one here which I created as an example. https://peacheypublications.forumotion.com/  

 Forumotion has some nice features and is pretty simple. There is also a newsletter function so that you can send messages to all the members of your forum. This is a handy tool if you are teaching distance classes, or would just like to set up some simple online discussion topics for your students. It also looks like they are taking their responsibilities seriously regarding e-safety too, though you should still read the terms of use, as there is some sharing with third parties of non-personal information.  

Hope you find this useful.  

Get lesson plans, tech tips and teacher resource books with our Teachers' Classroom App.

 

 

Nik Peachey - Pedagogical Director - PeacheyPublications Ltd

 

 

 

Videos for Global Issues Lessons

There's a fantastic collection of videos which can be used for focusing on Global Issues on the OneWorldTV YouTube channel. There are more than 100 of them and they focus on different issues from around the globe.

Here's how OneWorld describe themselves:

"OneWorldTV is a unique public platform for filmmakers, video journalists, NGO's and just about anyone with a video camera and an interest in social issues. It gives you the opportunity to access video messages and short films from around the world. Anyone with access to a camera and computer can contribute their films."

This is pretty emotive stuff, so be careful about the age groups and how you use it with your students. This is an example about cluster bombs dropped on South Lebanon.




The videos are mostly quite short, so they can be used with some lower level language speakers if you grade your task effectively. This is a fantastic resource on topics that are often hard to approach in class.

Hope you find these useful.

Related links:

• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teacher
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy 
• Education for the Global Economy
• Tackling political issues
• Video debating website
• Express Your Opinions

Best

Nik Peachey

Education for the Global Economy

There's some really interesting new stuff on Big Think with a number of experts giving their opinions on the American education system and the need for reform.

A lot of the opinions are connected with internet use and how well state schools are preparing their students for the demands of the 21st century.

It's all very US focused, but does have resonance around the world, so well worth a look and could be useful to get your students thinking a bit.

Related links:

• Tackling political issues
• Video debating website

Best

Nik Peachey