Stick Pick App

Stick Pick suggests question starters for learners at different levels and also records how well students respond during classroom discussions. Simply pick a student at random by giving your mobile device a shake or tapping the screen. If a student is consistently scoring near the top or bottom, simply change the level so students do not become bored or frustrated. Stick Pick uniquely links question stems to the cognitive or linguistic needs of each individual learner.

 

Implementation

Teachers have multiple soup cans (classes) filled with sticks (students). During setup, teachers choose a category of question stems they wish to focus on for each learner. Questions can be based on Bloom's Taxonomy, English as a second language skills, or degree of difficulty for each learner.

This iPad app costs $2.99 but is well worth the price! Formative assessment is easy to track because teachers can tap a corresponding correct, incorrect, or opinion button based on the student's answer. Teachers can also rate each student's answer by selecting 0-5 on a critical thinking rubric (Bloom's) or an elaboration rubric (for English as a second language).

Classroom Management

Stick Pick is a handy tool for any teacher to guide classroom discussion and formative assessment in really helpful ways. Teachers can mark sticks to avoid calling on the same students or repeatedly asking students the same questions. Students in small groups can also use Stick Pick . During small group work, students can take turns asking one another questions based on Bloom's Taxonomy, making group work more productive and on-task. Parent communication can be improved with Stick Picks because student performance can be recorded and automatically averaged within the app and emailed.