MIT App Inventor is a program for creating mobile applications (apps) for the Andriod operating system in a drag and drop manner.  It was a program which began as a Google Labs project and is now currently managed by Media Lab team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  MIT's App Inventor provides an introduction to programming concepts where students are able "build it & test it" in real world (immediate) fashion.

 For example, the first badge level in the app club is called "Hello Purr" ( a creative twist on 'Hello World', the first application programmers typically create).  In this app when a picture of a kitty is clicked it will purr.  Once students complete this app they receive the Hello Kitty badge and then are challenged to make a similar app of their own choosing.  One club student created a missile app and when a picture of a missile is clicked it sounds like a missile taking off.  Another student created dinosaur app that roared when clicked.  These student who have created their own app have earned the Hello Advanced badge as well as the Hello Kitty badge. 

A few weeks ago, I worked with a couple of other teachers in my ed tech endorsement class on a presentation about exit surveys. An exit survey (or exit ticket) is a very short and quick way of checking students’ understanding right at the end of class.  It can be a single question or a couple of quick problems to solve.  The purpose is to check a student's understanding on the key points of a lesson. It also serves as a check for the teacher so that they can see what, if any, material needs to be reviewed or retaught before moving on to another topic in the next class.

One of my ideas for our presentation on exit surveys was to host a live twitter chat where class members could ask questions during the presentation and then we asked them to post a final tweet summarizing what they learned about exit surveys during our presentation. It was a lot of fun and could be used in many secondary classrooms as a means for collecting student feedback. I have seen several live twitter walls/backchannel websites in the past, but for this presentation, I chose to use Visible Tweets and Twijector. 

A couple of weeks later, I set up the twitter backchannel again for our closing presentations. I connected a second projector to a computer running live broadcast of our class hashtag #csdendorse using Twijector (click to see the feed). I thought it would be fun to post responses to everyone's final projects in a group discussion forum. Visible Tweets (click to see the live feed) creates a beautiful, albeit less functional, version of the same information. 

All you need to get started is a twitter account (students probably already have one), a class hashtag (you can make this up, just be consistent), and a projector (though you don't need to project the live feed for this to work.)

Here are some ideas for how to use Twijector or Visible Tweets in your classroom:

1. Exit surveys. Ask students to tweet what they learned in class today using a class #hashtag.
   
2. Class discussions. Students who might be reluctant to ask questions in class can post questions and responses to twitter.
3. Historical reenactments: students can play the role of a historical figure and can send timed messages to relive a historical event. Read about an example of this from our endorsement class HERE.

I also found a really nice blog post titled: "Beyond the Exit Slip: Closure Activities for Classroom Instruction." The article gives some great examples and rationale for providing students with authentic learning activities at the end of a class.

Leave a comment below to share ideas about how you might use exit surveys and/or twitter as an assessment tool.

-Posted by Jared Ward