How Can Teachers Use It?
Instead of keeping track of your own metal can and set of popsicle sticks for each class, you can organize the sticks for multiple classes digitally. In addition to keeping track of sticks, you can also keep track of students. Measuring classroom participation can be tricky, but teachers can quickly see how well students pay attention in class and track their performance. The number of correct answers or points students earn may be averaged into an overall classroom-participation score or included as part of a student's grade.
Teachers can also use the sticks to see how well students answer questions that focus on a specific level of thinking or differentiate the question-asking process to meet students' individual needs.
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What's It Like?
Stick Pick is a classroom-management and -assessment app that takes the popsicle-stick-in-a-can concept digital and expands it to help teachers improve the way they ask questions in the classroom. While teachers can use it to simply add student names to a collection of sticks, they can also do a lot more. Student rosters can be easily uploaded from a CSV file and sync across devices. For each student, teachers can choose the mode/level of questioning. Modes include Bloom's Taxonomy, the revised Bloom's Taxonomy, and ESL skills and appropriate levels within them. So, Student 1 may always receive questions at the understanding level of Bloom's, while Student 2 may receive questions at the analysis level of Bloom's. In an ESL classroom, one student may receive questions at the beginning level, while another may receive questions at the intermediate or early advanced level.
The meat of the app comes not in setting up the class and student levels; instead, there are learning opportunities baked into the question-asking process itself. When a student's stick is randomly chosen, teachers see a selection of question stems related to the specific mode or level chosen. Teachers can also assess how well a student answers the question, marking an answer as correct, incorrect, or opinion and rating the response using a rubric. Teachers can then track how many questions students answer correctly and the scores they received for those answers. Comprehensive class scores can be shared as PDF or CSV files via AirDrop, iMessage, email, and print.
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Is It Good For Learning?
When students know they might be called on, they're more likely to pay attention in class. Not only will Stick Pick help improve student engagement, it will ensure the questions teachers ask actually promote learning. By asking questions based on specific modes and levels, teachers can make the content accessible to students at various levels, encouraging advanced learners to go further by asking them questions that involve higher-order thinking skills and building the confidence of lower-level learners by asking questions they can answer. It would be nice, however, to be able to add multiple levels and modes of questions for each student.
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Stick Pick provides randomized student names.
When setting up students, teachers can select assessment levels.
When a student's stick is selected, Stick Pick provides leading questions to help assess student understanding.
Teachers can check student-assessment percentages by pulling up the roster.
