Software+8+-+Xat

= Software #8 – Xat =

www.xat.com

__Use in Educational Setting –__

Polling questions are a fantastic way of gauging students thoughts and ideas. Xat provides an open-source option for teachers to create interactive polls. Creating a Xat poll allows the teacher to customize the question, the potential answers, the number of answers and the number of answers to each question. Xat poll questions are a useful tool for any educational setting.

__Cost, Registration Issues –__

Xat is a completely free service to users. There isn’t any registration either, you only have to log onto the website and customize the different values of the poll. Xat also has a chat room option to create a chat room with the same customizing options.

__Useful in what content and value to classroom –__

Using a poll question for any educational classroom is a useful tool. Poll questions provide a different way of gauging students understanding. Xat polls are a useful tool for any content area; in a history class you could put a few poll questions on a personal site to see how many students know a correct year for an event. In an English class you could poll students on the correct wording for a sentence. There are a lot of options available to teachers and students when using poll questions.

__Meta-cognition and Xat–__ Putting the learning and understanding into the student’s hands is exactly what meta-cognition is about. Poll questions force the students to explore and conquer their own knowledge. The use of poll questions allow students to challenge themselves to find the correct answer.

__Xat Product -__

Screen shots from Xat showing how to build a poll and what the poll looks like.