Fun with ActivePrompt

The math twitter-verse was abuzz this week with discussion of Riley Eynon-Lynch’s Activeprompt, a simple interface for  student collaboration.  For me, my interest started with a tweet from Dan Meyer, which invited volunteers to click a link and drag a mysterious red dot to a point equidistant from three schools.

While each participant can only see and consider their “red dot” movement, the teacher can see all red dots as they dance across the screen.  Enjoy my first experience with Activeprompt, as I used a colleague’s high school prob/stat class as my “volunteers”:

I appreciate tools like this which leave a lot of room for student and teacher imagination, and the conversations surrounding possible uses have gone in unexpected directions.  Too many math tech tools pigeon-hole users into a pre-determined path, and this tool meets many of the “wants” I have for my students:

• I want my students to participate
• I want my students to collaborate
• I want my students to assess each’s others ideas
• I want my students to realize similarities and difference between their ideas

The blank canvas is ready for us to fill.  For me, I look forward to using this as a tool for student estimation, or having students contribute points to scatterplots.  One of my favorites so far comes from a teacher who challenged students to work together to form two parallel lines.  The surface has just barely been scratched here.

The order of operations to get up and running is simple to follow:

• Go to the Activeprompt site:  http://activeprompt.herokuapp.com
• Load an imagine and write a prompt
• Provide students the given link
• View results on a different link, also given

Activeprompt is reported to also work on iPads, though I have not tried this yet. Looking forward to more attempts with this intriguing tool.