Teachers can lead students in real-time collaboration on open-ended questions.
The Live brainstorm widget allows students to contribute their ideas to a discussion anonymously. Teachers can hide the responses from other students while the brainstorming is taking place so that no ideas are squashed by quicker submissions or louder voices.
Responses and tools work in real-time to help the teacher guide the flow of discussion. The Live brainstorm acts like a question in that students can interact with it, but it is not marked because there is no right answer.
Click to jump straight to a section or keep reading below:
- How to set up the brainstorm;
- How students interact with the brainstorm;
- How to review student responses.
How to set up the brainstorm
The Live brainstorm widget can be found in the Collaborative tools section of your content bar in Prepare mode. If you can't see the content bar in your Lesson, click on the Add content tab sticking to the right edge of your page.
When writing the question, you have access to the full rich text toolbar that includes options for formatting, special characters, and mathematical notation. Click here for a complete tutorial on what's available. You may want to help your students with some visual cues, such as writing keywords in bold or highlighting details with italics.
There is no model answer for the Live brainstorm because there is no right answer.
Click the blue Done button in the lower right corner of the widget when you are satisfied with the question's setup.
How students interact with the brainstorm
Students working through your Lesson will see the question as you've written it followed by the discussion board and a text box for entering their answers. When a student submits an answer, it will be added to the board. If you've set the results to be visible, then your students will also see the answers submitted by their classmates. Students can submit as many answers as they want.
How to review student responses
Teach mode allows you to view and manage your students' responses during class and control the settings of the brainstorm. As your students submit answers, you can drag-and-drop to reorganize them and remove answers that are inappropriate or off-topic.
When you are ready to discuss the responses with your students, switch the Open toggle to Closed and switch the Students can see responses toggle to Yes. This will let your students see how others responded, and it will also prevent them from adding more or removing their own answers.
Student names are hidden by default. Click Show names to display the number of responses each student submitted and to label the responses with yours students' initials.
In Analyse mode, Live brainstorms only display the question. Click on View responses to open Quick review and see each student's collection of responses individually.
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