We want to make it easy for teachers to make their teaching interactive, social, and to use diverse content. If you've got an existing slide deck, you can upload it and let the system provide the interactivity without having to completely rewrite your course. (Of course you can start from scratch too if you want.)
Making interaction easy...
We make interactive content easy. Live polls on the main screen without clickers. Practice questions. External websites. Collaboratively edited documents. Videos. A new kind of question that's so much better than multiple choice. Even smart exercises working on diagrams. There's lots of stuff that's been in that orange shaded box...
Live chat, fast feedback...
There's a continuous chat stream down the right side of the page, that can be anonymous. You can open or close it -- I like to open it on the main lecture screen. We've had a lot of very useful comments appear in the chat that students wouldn't have been game to say in person. Right down to trivial things like
*brain explodes*when an explanation has been too hard to understand. And if I ask questions to the students, answers start appearing in the chat very quickly -- long before any student is brave enough to stick their hand up.
Let's continue this later...
The same interaction is on the lecture screen and on their laptops/tablets. That means, for instance, that students can carry on the conversation from the lecture back home in their dorm rooms.
Diverse content (part 1)...
The lecture slide isn't the only content in the world on this topic, you know! We make it easy for people to add alternative pages, collaborative student notes, useful websites, and other content against the topic of a slide. Students can hop between content without leaving the flow of a lecture.
Diverse content (part 2)...
We also make it easy to hop between different kinds of topic. From slide to notes to example to exercise to advice, etc.
Come in where you want...
Because everything is in the topic index, students can hop straight to that useful formula on Spoodle's Law that they were revising for the exam without first having to leaf through all the previous slides in the presentation.
Analytics...
Because students are interacting with a live system (not just leafing through printed out slides in their bedrooms), we can answer those questions like "So just what do students study the night before the exam?"
