Emoticon-mania in the classroom :)

A blog post that I wanted to share is entitled Must Turn in Emoticon to Exit posted about a month ago on the educational blog, Blog, blog blog blog, blog some more (check out my blog roll to visit the blog's home page).

This semester I am taking a Research in Literature course, and we have been talking about the need to conduct informal research in classroom to evaluate how effective our lessons, teaching strategies and approaches are for our students. While this may seem like a daunting task, this blog post offers a simple and fun way to get immediate feedback from your students. Ms. B, the teacher-blogger of this site, shares with us a new exit-slip she is having her students turn in after a lesson to see whether her lessons should be "celebrated, repeated" or "tweaked." I really like this idea, and it is a quick way to know how students feel about the lesson. All too often, I think we as teachers have an idea of how the lesson went in our own minds, but we never reach out to our students to see how our instruction is working for them. And since our teaching goals are aimed at structuring our class and lessons in the best way possible for them (and not for us) to learn and experience our classroom material, it is essential that we get their opinion and take on how things are going. This emoticon exit slip is a really practical way to get a feel for how our students perceive our teaching approach and lesson structures, so we can start to understand how it's actually going for the learners sitting in the desks in our classroom, and not just how we think it's going in our minds.

I give this blog post a:


I love this idea and think that it can be useful for teachers at all levels in all subjects!