Task 12: Create a Social Poll

Nik Peachey | Learning Technology Consultant, Writer, Trainer Teacher Development: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/

Task 12: Creating a ‘social’ poll using Urtak In this task you are going to create an ‘social’ online poll using a simple web based tool called Urtak.

Once you have created an account you can make as many polls or surveys as you want and get your students to answer them online. The poll is ‘social’ because the resulting information is shared with anyone who answers the questions, so you can see percentages of the people who give the same answer as you, and because anyone who registers on the site can also add their own questions to the poll (You can approve or disapprove them).

This is a very versatile tool for creating online learning materials. Here are some examples I have created using this tool.

• I created this poll for an online course with a group of teachers. The idea was to get them to think about and compare their understanding of why their students were studying English.

Feel free to try the poll and add your own answers: http://urtak.com/u/1760 • This one was created to test what students knew about ‘1st Conditional’ structures. You can compare your understanding too if you wish: http://urtak.com/u/1762 Now you see how these work, you can start creating an error quiz for your students. To do this you will need 5 - 10 sentences which contain errors that your students make. These could be spelling, grammar, vocabulary or punctuation errors or you could focus on common errors connected with a specific structure. You’ll also need a few correct sentences to add (I would suggest that you mix 5 incorrect sentences with 5 correct ones).

The next step is to go to: http://urtak.com/ and click on ‘Sign Up’.

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Nik Peachey | Learning Technology Consultant, Writer, Trainer Teacher Development: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/

You’ll then need to create a password and enter an email address. Then click on ‘Sign Up’.

Once you have done this you are ready to create your first poll. Just click on ‘Create an Urtak’ at the top of the page.

You will then be able to give your poll a name or type in a question. I have used the question “Which of these sentences are correct?” in the name field. You then add one of your sentences in the field below and click on ‘Ask’. The sentence should then appear underneath.

Once you have added all your example sentences, click on ‘Create’ and your Urtak poll should be created. You can then add a description. © NikPeachey@mac.com

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Nik Peachey | Learning Technology Consultant, Writer, Trainer Teacher Development: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/

Now you can decide how you want to share the poll with your students. You can copy the embed code and paste it into a web page or use on of the other services listed below it.

Or, the easiest way is to give the URL to your students.

Then they simply vote ‘Yes’ , ‘No’ or ‘Don’t Care’ and then they can see how other students voted.

The results are shown after they vote. This won’t tell them the answers of course but comparing their answer to other students’ answers, make them think more carefully and reflect on their answers, especially if their answer is different to the majority. © NikPeachey@mac.com

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Nik Peachey | Learning Technology Consultant, Writer, Trainer Teacher Development: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/

You can also see the overall data for all answers by clicking on ‘Results’ on the right.

You can make as many polls and surveys as you wish and collect as many responses as you wish too. All of the polls you create are collected in your ‘Dashboard’ area. You can get back to this by clicking on your username in the top right of the screen.

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Nik Peachey | Learning Technology Consultant, Writer, Trainer Teacher Development: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/

So now you have created you first Urtak online poll.

Follow up • Think about how you can use other polls with students, or get them to create their own polls for each other.

• You can find some teaching suggestions for using Urtak polls and some more examples here: ‘Creating Social Polls and Questionnaires Using Urtak’: http:// nikpeachey.blogspot.com/2010/04/creating-social-polls-and.html • Write about Urtak in your Penzu journal (from Task 1), make notes of any useful teaching ideas.

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