Topic 3

I first tried Poll Everywhere and created a sample poll--What is your favorite color?  I tried to type this question in Spanish, but I could not type an upside-down question mark or accented vowel.  I used Mircrosoft Word to type in this quesion and then copied and pasted it Poll Everywhere.  I have seen this used during a quick inservice this past spring.  I like the instantaneous results, but the limitations are that every student in my class needs to have access to either a cell phone or a computer.  This may present a problem, as my building has one writing lab with a classroom set of computers that is shared by the entire staff.  The other limitation is cell phone signal strength.  My cell phone carrier has a weak signal in my classroom (1-2 bars only).

I then decided to try Hot Potatoes after reading some positive reviews on the blogs.  I went through the tutorial and created my own exercise.  I created a JMatch using 5 clip art images (used Microsoft Office clip art saved to my desktop for easy access) with its corresponding Spanish vocabulary term.  I then saved and went to "Create Web Page" and chose the "View the exercise in my browser".  I like the standard and drag/drop choice.  The flashcard option would be useful for my students, but it didn't seem as user friendly.  I also noticed that altering clip art size is a must.  I found that 100 height is a good size and then keep the width to whatever the program automatically adjusts it to for proper ratio.  Anything larger and 5 clip art pictures didn't fit well on the screen with a height larger than 100.  I found that I had to delete the entire clip art image link to resize it; I couldn't figure out an easier way to do this.