About the App
You're going to love this app.
Not only is it easy to use, it's a heck of a lot of fun. And the fact that it will dramatically increase student engagement in your classroom makes it almost indispensible.
When used during lessons and discussions, the Class Cards app will enable you to:
- Use a randomly generated list of students from a class as an aid for determining which student to call upon.
- Quickly rate the quality of each student's response.
- View response scores by individual student or an entire class.
- Archive scores to a secure website where you can view class info, print grade sheets, or download the data for importing into an Excel spreadsheet.
- Select a student of your choosing to be the one to respond.
- Email yourself scores for all classes or a selected class.
For the record, the app is called Class Cards because it’s based upon an idea I wrote about in my first book by the same name. It’s a simple strategy in which the teacher uses a set of playing cards with the names of students written on each card as a way to determine which student to call upon.
Due to the randomness of the card order, every student is held accountable to what is going on during a lesson. This increased accountability helps to create an environment in which the entire class realizes they need to be ready with a response at any moment; something that doesn't happen in a traditional classroom in which the same handful of students do the majority of responding.
And if you were to use 3x5 index cards instead of playing cards, you'd be able to record the quality of those responses with just a pencil.
But as great as that strategy is with nothing more than a set of cards and a pencil, the app—as you will soon see—takes the whole thing to a brand new level.
This on-line guide was written to help you get started using it. You'll find that the app is fairly simple in operation yet has the potential for more than just deciding who to call upon. And even though you'll be using it like a pro in just a day or two, I thought it made sense to provide you with an illustrated owner's manual.
Thanks for purchasing the app. I wish you and your students nothing but the best as you begin to use it. My hope is that Class Cards will quickly become for you what it became for me: a teaching strategy that made my interactions with students more enjoyable and rewarding.
November 15, 2011
Rick Morris
New Management, Inc.
BTW: The app works on all Apple iDevices: iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Although it's not iPad-native—use 2x to fill the screen—the app works great and the images and text are easy to read.
