From PD Share to In Class Modeling… (part 1: ActivePrompt)

Collaboration is fun!

Last week I wrote about my October professional development share on ‘Making Content Interactive’ (you can give it a read here).

One of the items shared is called ActivePrompt. I discovered this tech gem during a district PD day last year from fellow middle school educator Kaity Haley (huge shoutout to her for the share)! ActivePrompt gives a teacher the ability to create this for students:

The teacher uploads an image and types a prompt, ActivePrompt does the rest; it gives you a link to share with students (where they will only see their dot) and a link to view responses.

One of my sixth grade Science teachers, Sven Strnad, took the risk of collaborating with me to improve discussions around interpreting graphs. This is an area of weakness he notices in 6th graders. We created a two variable line graph with data we made up. This was a follow-up to his activity from a previous school day where they actually created geysers of Diet Pepsi & Diet 7-Up (similar to below). Sven also took my recommendation to reach out to his supervisor and invite him in to see the collaboration between Sven (classroom teacher) and myself (Teacher Resource Specialist for Technology)

We used the graph we created for three different prompts:

  • Place your “dot” on the Independent Variable.
  • Extrapolate (fancy word for thoughtful guess) where the height of Diet Pepsi would be with 7 Mentos
  • Extrapolate (fancy word for thoughtful guess) where the height of Diet 7-Up would be with 7 Mentos

When we were ready, we were able to project the responses:

This visual kickstarted our conversation since we were able to see responses from ALL students while also keeping anonymity (students don’t log in so there are no names associated with the dots, ActivePrompt is great for informal assessment). We were able to make connections to math in terms of x-axis & y-axis, talking about outliers and trends. Of course, we had to discuss making sure students read directions (prompts). Sven was excited to see how quick the students were able to respond and how easy it was for him to operate. We utilized Google Classroom to post “Announcements” in the Stream for each activity, when we were ready. He is excited to use it again soon! Sven’s supervisor was glad to have the opportunity to see it in action and commented on how this was a nice instance of Domain 3c (Engaging Students in Learning) of the Danielson Framework in action with the Chromebooks.

Want to try it out yourself?

As I mentioned in my last post, I want to utilize Google Classroom on this blog more as a means for other educators to see real examples. This activity is linked to an “Assignment” in a Google Classroom I created for this blog (Code: mfq04n). If you try to sign up with your school account and get an error message, it is probably because your school’s domain is locked down and you can’t join outside of your domain. You may have to join with your personal Google account or create a free Google account. 

Have you used ActivePrompt with your students? I would love to read about your experiences with ActivePrompt in the comments below.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *