Cinch

Just because a student doesn’t raise their hand doesn’t mean they don’t have an answer.

It’s hard enough to get students to engage in the class; teachers want active participation, but what’s really valuable is the feedback teacher’s rely on to make student’s experiences better.

A common question is “does anybody not understand this?”

Teachers ask this question because they don’t want to leave anyone behind, but no student wants to publicly admit to being slow. Anonymity in a classroom is what sparked our project. Is there a way to raise your hand digitally?

There are lecture tools out there. Evaluations and questionnaires take too long, and clickers don’t allow teachers to ask the kinds of questions they want to ask. Many tools require teachers to either change their presentation style or call for too great a learning curve to be immediately useful.

Cinch is a simple solution for simple feedback.

Teacher’s don’t expect a tool to take over the process of communicating to their students, they’re trained specifically to communicate to students. Yet sometimes uncomplicated questions that may only require a yes or no, still intimidate students.

Cinch helps students participate who might otherwise feel pressured, even in the simplest ways.

But Cinch doesn’t just allow quite students to raise a virtual hand; students can choose to express that they “Got It!”, that they’re “Confused”, or they can submit a typed response.

Once this tool is in place, not only can a student inform a teacher to what extent their following along, but they can also ask a specific question or suggest a potential direction.