Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Answer Garden Tutorial”.
In this article tutorial we’re gon na take a quick look at answergarden. Ch answergarden is a really interesting idea and it’s a very simple easy to use tool. But what it is is it’s a way for you to pose questions to your students, throw out a question for discussion or for brainstorming or even for formative assessment purposes. And then the students respond to your question and you can see an example here on their home page at answergarden CH. You can see an example of how the results look, the more people that give a particular answer.
The bigger the answer will appear in the final results, so in this case the word interesting was entered. The most great idea was entered a lot, but exciting and simple were only mentioned – maybe a couple of times. So this is what it looks like after the students have entered their answers. So let’s look at how to make your own answer garden.
Where there’s a question that you send to your students and then they answer it and the results are sent to you. The good news is, you, don’t need to have an account with answer garden, and neither do your students, all you have to do, is go to the website. Click, the plus sign or you could click create answer garden either way, and it takes you to this screen. You have to put in a topic. This is the question that you want answered. So, for example, let’s say in a science class I want to pose the question.
What qualities would be helpful for a future inventor to develop? So, in other words, if I wanted to become an inventor, what qualities should I develop in myself? So that’s my question and you’ll notice. My question was a little bit long, typically they’re, not this long, but I came right up against the limit. I can’t type anymore. I can’t put my question mark in there, so that’s something to know that there is a limit to the number of characters you can put in next.
There’S a bunch of options, and these are great options. But, to be honest, I just stick with the default. Whatever the default is, I keep it and just use it, but let’s take a quick look in case you’re interested in some of these other options. Answergarden mode gives us the default of classroom and, as you can see in this classroom mode, the respondents can put an unlimited number of answers, but each particular answer can only be sent in once and so that way one student can’t sway the size of a particular Answer more than just the one time that they submit it.
There are other options, though you can do brainstorm mode. You can do moderator mode. Each answer will be submitted to answer garden so that you, as the teacher can manually, approve these entries to your answer garden. So this is great, if you’re concerned, that your students might submit some answers that are swearwords or inappropriate in some way, or they might just goof off and put in an answer that they don’t really care about they’re just going for a laugh.
This might be a good option, moderator locked if you lock it. The answer garden is closed. It’S set in stone, nobody can change the results unless you unlock it and then there is also brainstorm mode which is similar to classroom mode in a lot of ways. Another option: another setting that you can change is the answer lengths by default you’re limited to twenty characters, but if you’d like to double that, you can change it to 40, and this is the limit for the students for the people. Answering the question. I’M gon na leave it at twenty in this case. Next up, we have admin password, and this is a really good important thing to do in my opinion, put in a password and the reason this is important is even if you’re not concerned about your students, maybe putting something inappropriate in it could happen, or you know, For some reason you might want to change one of the answers, maybe they misspelled a word and it really is annoying or it causes some problems.
You can use this password to get back in and you can delete out answers that you don’t want to be in your answer garden. If you would like, you can put in an email address, and this will make it so that you can receive an email that has a link to your answer garden. It has your password, so you won’t forget where your answer garden is stored and how to get in to edit it.
So next up, you can uncheck this. If you don’t want to receive email about answer garden and next up, we have a spam filter. This could be really useful. You can turn on that spam filter that should detect common unwanted answers like swear words and things like that, and then finally, you can add local discoverability.
This makes it so that neighbors teachers in other parts of the building and the maybe in the district can easily find your answer garden in many cases, if you’re just gon na use this with your classroom, you might want to just change it to hidden if it’s Just for you and your students – maybe just hide it, but when you’re done click create and it generates for you a page on answergarden dedicated just to your question, and the address for this page is right here at the top. So this URL up here is unique to my question and this session that I’m gon na use with my students. Now I, as the teacher and anyone else that has the link, can go here and can answer the question I’ll put in a couple of answers. Okay, there’s one answer and give me a couple of seconds and I’ll put in a few more answers and then we’ll resume okay. Now these are all answers I’ve put in, but if there were a group of people answering this question, you would see some of these answers getting bigger and bigger and others shrinking and staying small and that kind of thing. Now, if I put my mouse on top of these answers, it will tell me how many people have given that answer. So that’s a helpful thing to know so at this point really, that’s all you need to know to get started using answergarden. That’S it just go to answer garden: ch click, the create an answer, garden button put in your question and your options and then just get this URL and share it with your students.
There are some options along the bottom that are good to know about, for example, QR. If you click on QR, it gives you a QR code that makes it really easy and quick for students to be able to access your answer garden, especially if you’re using mobile devices like iPads Kindles, smart phones, things like that. So that’s a great option. There’S also a share button that gives you a variety of ways to share your answer garden using social media. You can also embed your answer garden on a website so that it just appears on your own education website on your own blog, wherever you want to put this, you can just double click to highlight this embed code copy it and then paste it into the HTML. Editor on your website, whether it’s a Weebly website or really lots of different websites allow this kind of embedding so try it out.
Here’S the URL, it’s just the same as the URL up here, but it’s good to have it listed out again. So those are some really good options for sharing your answer garden. If you would like to export your results, if you click export, it says tweet the results on Twitter export answers to Wordle, there’s all of these nice options that you should check out. If you have set up your answer garden in such a way that it needs to be moderated, you can click here on moderate and it will take you to a page where you can approve or disapprove of the answers that have been put in. We do have a couple of other nice options, there’s refresh if answers are coming in, live as you’re looking at it. Sometimes they won’t appear immediately.
You might have to click refresh for it to really refresh and also notice that it kind of jumbles the words and makes it look a little different. You can also click admin and when you click admin, it takes you here where there’s some options and you can edit. You can change some of your options that you had before. You may need to know your password at this point in order to be able to make those admin changes, but that’s important to know and then finally, we have expand when you click on expand. This takes it to full screen and you know that might look a little better, a little nicer, so I’m gon na escape out of that, because I wanted to show you that, yes, there are some nice ways to export the results, but if you just want to Take a picture of what you have here in answergarden there’s a couple of little tricks.
You can use one on a Mac, you can hold command shift and then tap the number 4 and it will give you this symbol here. It looks like a plus sign and then you can just click and drag a box around what you want to take a picture of, let go and it takes a snapshot of that it takes an image of it and puts it on the desktop of your computer. You can then use that in PowerPoint you can use it in Word or just about any other tool. If you have a Windows, computer there’s a little tool called the snipping tool, and you should definitely check this out. If you don’t already know about it, just go down in Windows to the lower left corner, to do a search and search for snipping, open the snipping tool and you’ll be able to do the same kind of thing.
You’Ll be able to take a snapshot of things that are on your screen. So thanks for watching – and I hope you enjoy using answer – guard to do formative assessment to do brainstorming and to start discussions. But again, thanks for watching and please consider, subscribing to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and watch for a new video, at least every Monday. .