Originally posted kevin low on May 27, 2018
Hi everyone,
Answer Garden is a resource that I like to use to help open the door to new topics and units in any subject. As many students may have heard certain terminology once or twice but do not fully understand the meaning yet, answer garden allows students from many different back grounds to express what they think the answer might be.
This allows students to see other people’s perspectives on a given topic/subject that they have only scratched the service with so far.
Teachers can use this tool for simple classroom brainstorming in a multitude of ways in any subject and allows students to see what their peers also think about a certain topic all in real time. Another way to use this is just for feedback on a given unit. For example, as a chemistry teacher I might quickly pull up this application and the question I put into the app might be: What was your overall understanding of Bronsted Lowry Acids and Bases in this unit? I would then give them 5 options to answer in answer garden.
As multiple people answer the same answer, this option grows in size and ranking, allowing the teacher to see which answer dominates over the others giving feedback.
Answer garden is not bound by a limited number of feedback options, as you are able to have 1000s of responses on the answer garden for any given topic. I personally only use this for simple feed back or as a gateway into a new topic. But there are many educators that really love this technology and use it frequently.
I thought Answer Garden sounded like it would be a great addition to a course. After doing a little bit of research, I also discovered that it is free and doesn’t require an account be set up. Anyone can jump in and use the tool. It’s incredible easy to use and that alone makes it very appealing. At first glance, Answer Garden seems to be very similar to a standard online discussion board or quiz, but upon digging deeper, it can be used in a variety of ways and the output is unique. The answers present themselves in a word cloud. The more often an answer is submitted, the bigger the response shows up in the word cloud. A user of this tool would need to understand that it wouldn’t work well for long or detailed answers. It only works for 1 to 3 word answers, which limits its use. I design online courses and the courses need to be completed prior to launch. The instructor is not able to make changes to the course post-launch. This tool would allow instructors set up polls in the real time, which I think they would love. I can see it being useful! My only real worry is accessibility. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find out if Answer Gardens work well with screen readers.