How do professors increase student engagement and gain quick feedback on the effectiveness of students utilizing course-specific vocabulary? Explore how I have blended online polling and gamification in a unique way that promotes student engagement and retention with minimal expenses. A demonstration of students playing the game will be included in the recording. “Descriptionary” develops students’ verbal communication skills and enhances their ability to describe, analyze, and categorize images. Using a free website, I created polls with several similar images. The students take turns as the Descriptor, who is secretly assigned an image to describe. They are limited by categories rolled on dice (for an added degree of difficulty) as the rest of the class is trying to guess which image is being narrated. The Descriptor then sees what image(s) the class has selected, giving them immediate feedback about how effective their explanation has been. Then they can revise and expand their language to guide students to the intended image. At the end of each round, we do a word cloud to evaluate what keywords were most helpful and what additional information could have been provided to aid the class. This is a warm-up and practice activity with a prep time of 10 to 30 minutes and a cost of $0 to $5.
Demo Videos on how to setup up Descriptionary on PollEverywhere.com and of students playing the game are available on my YouTube:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8v5GWRFIISf1JFdpnJEo2wsqykEAO29w
Be sure to join the Office Hours discussion for this video on Thursday morning. Find more information on that session here:
https://teachx21.sched.com/event/j8mt
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