Today in our Postgraduate, Digital Innovation class at Salford Business School, we were investigating innovative ways to visualise data. The class are also formulating and pitching their own digital innovation ideas, which we hope they may be able to enter into one of our innovation competitions later in the year.
I was recently introduced to a new, easy to use live poll tool called doopoll. I had a good chat with the developers and joined the beta program. We chatted through a few ideas about how I could use the tool with the class to get some feedback on their ideas. In the end, we used doopoll twice in the class to live poll and make decisions about what activities we undertook. With passion for Technology Enhanced Learning and recent winner of most innovative teacher at Salford Uni, I’m always up for giving new things a go – the medium is also sometimes the message when it comes to subjects like Digital innovation.
For the actual pitching of ideas part, the class said they would prefer text feedback rather than 
doopoll’s multi-choice or slider options – which had worked well for the previous two activities. For this then, we turned to Socrative in order to get text comments. After the class, I took a minute to visualise the text comments into tag clouds that we had been discussing earlier in the class. There are various tools for this, but I used wordclouds.com on this occasion. I do love the way Word clouds visualise the text – but I am sometimes left disappointed at the way the meaning of some of those comments is changed by clustering them. I need to do some further thinking and experimenting to find other interesting ways to display this data.
All in all though – the activity worked well and I will definitely try this again – doopoll worked better than expected and I think it is a neat way to gather opinions quickly to make sessions more interactive. Do drop me a line if you have any thoughts or comments about this post.
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