Dotstorming!

French teacher, Ms. +Sara Kahle Ruiz, is a very creative teacher and is always interested in finding new ways to engage her students. On one of these searches Ms. Kahle Ruiz found a website called “Dotstorming”.

Dotstorming is an online voting tool that “allow[s] groups of people to collaborate on a topic.” Ms. Kahle Ruiz used Dotstorming in her Honors French 3 class by creating a board with a variety of different places (Africa, farm, forest, mountain, beach) and asked the students questions such as “Which location would you most like to visit?” For each question, students cast their vote through dotstorming. Once the students voted, they were asked to turn to a partner and explain why they would want to travel there.

This process continued with a variety of questions like “Where would you least like to travel?”, “Which place would be the best for families?”, “Which place would you most like to live?”, etc. Between each voting question, the students were asked to turn to their partners and discuss, in French, why they answered each question the way they did.

At the end of the voting process, the students were asked to post a sentence under each location in French. It could be about anything, but it had a) to be in French and b) couldn’t repeat anything someone else had already said.

Additionally, Sara asked students to add a photo of a place to the Dotstorming board. The students then voted on which of the places added by their classmates that they prefered the most and again talked about it in French with their classmates.

Here are some more ideas for using Dotstorming in the classroom (Source, Source, Sara Kahle Ruiz):

• Have each student create a board about a certain topic to share with the class.
• Create a board as a topic for discussion.
• Pose a question to the students and have them answer by posting media to explain their answer.
• Have students use a board to share ideas for a group project.
• Ask students to contributing factors that caused a certain problem and then vote on their importance.
• Create a board with pictures of characters from a story/film and ask students to share information, thoughts, quotes about each one.
• Post a vocabulary category and ask students to write words that relate to the topic. Can be played as a game in that the person who can post the most original ideas, wins!

Interesting in learning more about Dotstorming? Check out this tutorial.

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