I want to add more interactivity to my lectures. Gary Abud, a friend and former mentee, told me that
about GoSoapBox that he is using in his class room. He showed me how it works for 15 minutes earlier this week and I put together a board review style lecture that I did on Friday morning.
What immediately attracted me to GoSoapBox was that it was a web app. I did not need to hand out or customize my presentation for an Audience Response System with little remote controls for every student. All I did was flash a website and log in number on the opening slide. The residents then logged into my event on their phone or iPad or laptop. No one needed to download an app.
Then I went through a series of questions. These were questions I found in the dark bowels of the internet, they are not mine and I don’t know where they came from.
The Keynote is here (Keynote | PDF). The quiz is still open so you can down load the quiz and answer the questions if you like.
The residents had no trouble logging in when I flashed the website and access code on the screen. I tagged most slides with the log on information so late comers could join.
My first issue was I did not get good feedback on how many people had logged on. No messages flashed on my screen showing successful log ons. There is a box at the bottom of the event manager that showed number of people logged in, but with my iPad in landscape orientation, I could not see it unless I scrolled down. I would have liked a window listing the people who had logged on, right at the top.
When I started the lecture and we came to a question I received no feedback of the number of people who had answered it and could not get realtime feedback on how they answered. I can see the answers after the fact. GoSoapBox packages a beautiful spreadsheet of the questions and answers for download, but I did not get any realtime feedback. I needed simple things, like what percentage of people had answered the question so I could know when to reveal the answer and begin explaining the physiology.
I also could not see what answers people putting in to guide my explanation to what people found tricky.
Also the residents receive no feedback on whether they were right or wrong. It would be nice for them to get a score when they were done or even to enable question by question feedback.
In the end I tried to use GoSoapBox in a way that it was not intended. I made a quiz which is designed for students to plow through it from beginning to end and then I can evaluate it after the lecture. It looks like the feature I should have used was Polls. Here are the help videos for both tools.
Quiz
Poll
My feeling is that GoSoapBox looks like a promising tool but that I need more experience and knowledge on how to use it properly. I will keep posting my experience with it as I move forward. Smartphones and iPads are in the morning report classroom we just need to start leveraging them for education rather than fighting their primary use, distraction.
