AnswerGarden
AnswerGarden is a feedback tool that is very easy to use for online brainstorming or for gaining feedback from visitors to your website. At it’s simplest level you enter a question like “What did you think of my lesson?” and publish it, then invite students to visit the site and respond. You can set it so that it only allows one response per IP address per day (that might limit your use of it in school) or you can set it for unlimited answers. The answers then take the form of a word cloud eg if lots of people respond with the word “cool” it will appear larger than a word that is only used once or twice.
Once you have completed a feedback session there is the option to export the answers to Wordle or Tagxedo (these were in beta at the time of writing). You can also generate a QR code.
The website includes the code to embed it into webpages so you may be able to embed it into your VLE. There are also buttons to share your AnswerGarden on social networks if you want to attract even more people.
Below is a simple AnswerGarden that I have embedded into the blog (I didn’t dare ask what you thought of my blog!)
I have had a couple of problems with embedding it, sometimes only one or two words appear and it doesn’t update. If you can’t see more than one word click on the link underneath the example below you should see all of them in the new window that opens. There are some useful tools for embedding into blogs hosted by WordPress but mine is hosted by someone else, I am assuming that there is a plugin missing.
http://answergarden.ch/cloud.swf?cloudid=20509&unlimited=1
And now you can edit the appearance as well!
I have since found that WordPress.com is not the best place for embedding links to other sites such as Storybird and Aviary. I don’t really want to change provider again so I hope there will be a solution soon!