The Connected Classroom Kit
Interactive
With Kahoot, answering questions in real time through an easy-to-use interface, students play against each other aiming to top the on-screen leaderboard, while the teacher facilitates and discusses the content. It features a simple 'drag & drop' creator tool (using any device), build quizzes with embedded imagery and video, based on educational content. Or, find public content to play.
Socrative lets teachers engage and assess their students with educational activities on tablets, laptops and smartphones. Through the use of real time questioning, instant result aggregation and visualization, teachers can gauge the whole class’ current level of understanding. Socrative saves teachers time so the class can further collaborate, discuss, extend and grow as a community of learners. Instant class & student level reports with real time student activity.
Nearpod is multiplatform, you and students can interact through iOS devices, Chromebooks, Windows 8.1 devices, Android devices, Nooks and any PC or MAC. You can push information, questions, polls, slideshows, videos, audio and other activities to your students. You can find free or paid interactive multimedia presentations from distinguished educators. Simply upload a pdf or start a new presentation & add interactive features, and your students can join you from any device with a code.
Infuse Learning provides a platform by which teachers can seamlessly engage every student on any device. You can make informed decisions at the point of instruction with real-time, student feedback. Infuse Learning isn’t limited by device or location. Students in a distance learning environment, homebound students, or even students collaborating internationally can participate at the same time from any location via the internet.
Polls
Polldaddy allows you to create stunning (unlimited) online surveys, with unlimited responses. You can use the survey editor to create surveys quickly and easily, and collect responses via your website, e-mail or on your ipad, or iphone.
Polleverywhere lets you engage your audience or class in real time from any device via text.
SurveyMonkey is a tool that allows users to create their own surveys using question format templates. The basic version of SurveyMonkey is free; an enhanced version is also available as a paid version. While the tool is quite intuitive, how-to is available here
Backchanneling
TodaysMeet is completely free to use. Setting up a chat area in TodaysMeet is very simple. To set up your chat area just select a name for your room (that name becomes the url for your chat area), how long you want your room to exist, and select an optional Twitter hashtag for your chat area. To invite people to your chat area send them the url. What makes TodaysMeet different from services like Tiny Chat is that TodaysMeet doesn't have a public gallery of chat rooms containing questionable content. TodaysMeet also doesn't place inappropriate advertising on your chat area.
Chatzy provides a free platform for hosting your private chat area. To use it, simply name your chat area, select your privacy settings (you can password protect it), then send out invitations. Instead of sending out invitations you could just post the link to your chat area. Chatzy is a nice alternative toTiny Chat because you can restrict access to it.
Chatterous is a free platform for creating your own private or public chat rooms. What makes Chatterous different is that you can join Chatterous rooms via cell phone, IM (Google Talk), or email. Should you decide to make your chat room public, Chatterous rooms can be embedded into your blog or website.
Mister Thread is a free service for creating your own backchannel forum. Creating your forum (or thread) can be as simple as naming it and clicking "create the thread." Once you click create Mister Thread assigns your thread a url. Give that url to the people that you want to participate in the conversation. If you want to password protect your thread then choose a password that all visitors to your thread must enter. You can also enter your email address to give yourself the option to destroy your thread.
Padlet is a virtual wall that allows people to express their thoughts on a common topic easily. It works like an online sheet of paper where people can put any content (e.g. images, videos, documents, text) anywhere on the page, together with anyone, from any device.
Privacy Features: Visibility: allows you to customize how public you want the wall to be (i.e., completely private, password protected, hidden link (hidden from Google and public areas of Wallwisher), and/or totally public). Moderate posts: requires you to approve posts before they show up on the wall, a great enhancement that allows teachers to moderate student comments.
Backchannel Chat is a class discussion tool that was designed from the ground up to support teachers. Backchannels are great for increasing participation in classroom discussions and for informally assessing your students’ knowledge. The teacher can control all aspects of the discussion, you can remove messages and prevent students from posting, if the pace of the discussion is overwhelming and key messages are lost you can take control and lock the room so that only you can add content.