What is it?
UniDoodle is a sketch-response app, allowing students to submit graphs, drawings, text and calculations by sketching on their mobile device,with lecturers able to view those responses instantly at their PC. A lecturer can add feedback to a student submission and send it back to the whole group – highlighting correct answers or pointing out common mistakes or points of interest.
Below is a demonstration of how the software looks in action.
You can read a fuller description of the software, and the benefits of using it, in this Expert Guide.
Why would you use it?
This software is most useful when lecturers want to check understanding (formative assessment) but want students to demonstrate this through sketching.
Some examples could be:
- Annotating images to solve a problem or complete an answer
- Annotating images to show relationships between concepts
- Annotating images to consider ‘what if’ scenarios
- Labelling images to recall previous knowledge
- Drawing or sketching to illustrate an answer
- Highlighting errors or omissions on existing content to demonstrate understanding
In many cases it's likely that lecturers would want all students to participate in answering questions. Another option, particularly helpful if not all students come to class with a touchscreen device, would be to have a device that can be passed around the class. In this way individuals could participate, without having to come to the board at the front of the class.
An example of how UniDoodle has been used at Maynooth University can be viewed in this video presentation.
How could you use it?
There are many ways to use this tool, but here is one example question for students in Electrical and Electronic Engineering (Computational Intelligence), provided by Dr Ben Metcalfe. The link takes you to a presentation that describes each step in the process.
Does it enhance learning?
This is a new tool but already there are some positive results for learning being recorded. You can read an evaluation of its use in this paper (see link below), written by the team who created the software for their own teaching at Maynooth University.
McLoone, S.C., Kelly, C. (2017). An evaluation of the UniDoodle student response system in a first year systems and control module. [Online] Signals and Systems Conference (ISSC), 2017 28th Irish (Accessed at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7983610/)
The evaluation concludes that staff and students found the software easy to use (always a good starting point) but both groups also found it to be beneficial to learning. In particular, student assessment results were noticeably higher, which students attributed to having to focus more during lectures. Staff felt that they were able to use the formative feedback from students to effectively target weak areas or areas of misinterpretation.
You can also read blog a post by Keith Brown about Dr Fiona Dickinson (Faculty of Science) who has already tried UniDoodle.
If you would like more information about UniDoodle please get in touch via e-learning@bath.ac.uk
