Spiral Education

This past week, Spiral Education contacted me via Twitter to ask me to try their app called Spiral Education. Spiral allows you to create classes, utilize apps that are for questions and answers, host discussions, and work on group projects.

There are two ways to go about adding students. You can either send them to the site and they search for your school or you can create a login for them. I actually did it both ways. I much prefer that I create the login for them. My students (8th graders) had issues remembering what their username and passwords were. This just makes me shake my head in embarrassment but they really made their own username and password and forgot what they created.

According to Spiral, users can use any device to login and participate. I'm not sure what the best device would be to use. We had problems from the beginning. Maybe there were too many people on at once. Students had issues submitting their answers, seeing the box to type/draw their answers, and work on the group project that I assigned later in the week. Some students were never able to participate.

My school district is 1:1 and I need the apps and technology we use to work more times than not. I found Spiral to be a little too glitchy for me. This caused time to be wasted, frustrated students, and frustrated teacher. Spiral doesn't have a good FAQ or guide to get you started either. This is all by testing things  out.

I wish I could recommend using Spiral Education but at this time, I see that there are many problems that need to rectified before using again in my classroom. I love the idea. Kinks need to be worked out.