Tom Robb

Kyoto Sangyo U. (Emeritus)

Tom has been a member of JALT since 1976 and has served in various positions, including President and Executive Secretary. He has been Chair of TESOL's CALL Interest Section twice, and is now the Chair of the new Reading & Vocabulary Interest Section. His main interests are ways to use technology to make teaching and learning more effective. Peereval is one of those efforts. His brief handout can be downloaded at: https://peereval.mobi/Robb-JALTCALL2020.pdf


Sessions

Give your students more speaking time with PeerEval

Sun, Jun 7, 11:20-11:50 JST

Peereval is an app, available on web browsers and iOS systems, that allows students to rate their classmates in real time as they are speaking, according to criteria that you establish before hand. Students can, at the end of the session see a summary of their evaluations by the other students, including comments. The instructor can download all results as an Excel file.The app is free to use although there is a 'premium' version which allows the teacher to keep the results indefinitely (and defrays server costs). The app was originally designed so that groups of students could give presentations in small groups rather than frontally to the entire class. This allows more total speaking time for students and reduces the stress the often results from speaking in front of the entire class. The app also encourages more frequent speaking practice since the instructor no longer needs to evaluate the presentations or transfer data from individual paper-based evaluation sheets. Registration is simple, and no student data is required except a 'handle' for each student. The presenter developed PeerEval for his own classes, but it is now in use around the world.