User:Leofrascoli/sandbox/Quick Draw - Evaluating the website

Quick Draw  is an app aimed mostly at youngsters who like drawing and interacting with their classmates. It is an app which creates new opportunities to learn new vocabulary in quite a fun way. To make the most of it, classrooms should be furnished with an e-board and an e-pen as well. That way, Quick draw is super user-friendly and highly intuitive: all you have to do is click on the yellow button on the bottom of the page that says "Let's draw!'.

I suppose students aged from 8 to 18 may have a great time using this app, because everyone gets the chance to draw something on the e-board so everyone else in the classroom can see. It's a challenging task to "translate" words into hand-drawn images. On top of that, the interface and layout is really attracticve to kids and young adults. Another thing that I find attractive to these age groups is that there is a commentator who tries to guess what students are drawing while they are doing it, and most comments are purposedly comic! It's usually a lot of fun and funny, even though the design is rather simplistic, because you make the design yourself.

As for teachers' teaching goals, this app is more appropriate to end-of-class moment, wrapping up a class with a lot of vocabulary acquisition. Honestly, it is suitable to all ages, as long as students are open-minded and are not afraid of being in the spotlight for a litlle while. What I can see in my groups is that students help each other with the meanings of the words to be drawn up, laugh a lot at each other's drawings, learn many new words in the most fun way possible and eventually leave the classroom with a sense of fulfilment.

After students finish drawing six nouns, one round is completed. After that, a new screen opens with other students' drawings of the same 6 words your students have drawn. That is an excellent way to check whether they actually knew what the words were, so that they see other people's contributions. It's a funny moment too, since some drawings happen to be worse than the ones your group came up with. This feedback and comparison help students reflect on their drawings and memorise the recently-learnt words, which makes the learning process extremely meaningful and effective. What's best about the app is that teachers may give life and colour to a group that may be feeling a bit bored and demotivated with the lack of technological resources. Quick draw is massively inclusive and welcomes kinaesthetic and spatial learners to take part in a lesson more directly, not to mention that solitary learners might greatly benefit from group interactions created by the use of this app. The way you imagine the object is the way you will design/draw it. The possibilities are endless. To make this activity more engaging, it's important that teachers know their students very well and sort them in different groups to compete. That way teachers will sort different types of learners within each group, so as to maximise interaction and collaboration among them. All in all, I strongly recommend the use of this app, because is integrating and invites some learner types which are often left out of the traditional teaching approach to take over leading roles in the learning process.