Have you ever wanted to know exactly what all of your students understand about your lessons at any given point in time? Of course you have. Every teacher has, but it’s not as easy as you might think. Some students just don’t speak much in class, others might not tell you the truth for fear of looking bad in front of their peers. Even if your students do give you the feedback you need, how do you as the teacher keep track of it, and use it to inform your teaching in real time without interrupting the flow of your lesson? Well, you could use Geddit.
Geddit is simple, but oh so effective. For starters, it works on almost any device with a modern web browser, so it doesn’t matter if you are using Chromebooks, iPads, or even cell phones. The teacher creates a class and starts to prepare their first lesson by adding the key points they want to receive student feedback on as well as any questions that they want to push out to students to check for understanding. The next step is to add students to your class. You choose their username and password so that they can log in to interact with your lesson.
When you are ready to start your teaching, you give students a unique code to join your class. As the lesson progresses, students can “check-in” at any time on their own device by selecting their comfort levels on a series of ascending bars. The feedback is private and updates in real time on the teacher’s screen.
You can send your pre-made questions directly to student devices whenever you are ready for them to answer them, or pause on key objectives to get students to indicate their current comfort levels with the materials. You can also ask questions on the fly if your lesson takes a new direction or you just want to create a quick poll to vote on student ideas.
At the end of the lesson, when the students have left class, the teacher can access a full panel of analytics that shows data for individual students, and for the class as a whole. You can also leave a private note on your lesson, perhaps as a reflection of how well it went or what you would change before teaching it again to the next class.
Geddit was created by a teacher, and was first piloted in his own classroom before taking it public to the world. It is currently free while in Beta, but don’t expect it to stay that way for too long. The website lists its service as “free for a limited time” so we will have to wait and see how long that might be or if there will always be some kind of free account. Nevertheless, Geddit is well worth trying because of the immediate bang for the buck you will surely get. More information on Geddit can be found in the presentation below.