Blog Post 12: AnswerGarden

https://answergarden.ch/

        This blog post is about AnswerGarden, a tool of my own interest from the list of technologies for TLC: L2 - Learning through Collaboration. AnswerGarden is a tool that allows you to pose a question and have students answer it. It then arranges the answers into a word cloud, making repeated answers bigger and displaying all the answers in a graphic way. It allows the creator to share the question with others so that they can submit their own answers.

        For ease of use, AnswerGarden is very simple. All you need to create an AnswerGarden is a question. You can then send the link to students so that they can send in their answers from their own devices, or you could do it as the moderator by typing in the answers for students. It is a very basic framework, so it is easy to use. AnswerGarden does the answer organizing for you by arranging the word cloud in a visually appealing way with the most common answers being written in bigger text. 

  AnswerGarden is not super versatile. It can be used in different ways, but its only function is to make a word cloud with the answers given. There are some options for the creator to control answer inputs such as filtering certain answers or changing how long answers can be. Besides that, AnswerGarden pretty much does one thing. This site could be used in different ways, but the versatility of the website itself isn't great. Because of this, in the SAMR model, I think this technology best fits in the Augmentation category. Creating a word cloud based on answers to a question is something that can be done without technology like this. However, the way AnswerGarden increases the size of more common answers and gives students the ability to participate at the same is a form of augmentation of basic word cloud creation. It makes the whole process easier and more interactive. 

        For the overall likelihood of using this in my future teaching, I'd say it's pretty high. Word clouds can be used for lots of things in the classroom, and if I were going to use one it'd be this site. I like that you can share the word cloud with students, so they can work from their own devices.