What is Rolljak?
Rolljak is a versatile teaching platform that enables teachers to easily translate their ideas into the classroom in an interactive and engaging way. Teachers can ask open-ended questions and students can respond through text or diagrammatic responses.
Rolljak embodies the 4 Cs of 21st-century competencies: Communication, Creativity, Collaboration, and Critical Thinking. It's an all-in-one teaching platform that's jam-packed with interactive features.
Rolljak uses the principles of Design Thinking and Innovation Thinking and introduces it in a bite-sized, gamified and guided manner to spark innovative discussions and boost engagement in any setting.
Much like it's namesake, with Rolljak you can promote better communication, creative ideas, seamless collaboration, critical thinking and teamwork among students without having to change your lesson plans.
What's good about Rolljak?
Rolljak makes it easy for teachers to engage students in both physical and online classrooms.
Easy to set up - Rolljak has preset activities that enable you to easily set up sessions.
Easy to implement in class - Easily invite students to join your lessons with a simple 6 digit code.
Powerful and customizable - Preset activities not working out for you? No worries. Customize the preset activities to suit your needs or build a new game from scratch.
Sketched responses - Want diagrammatic responses? Give students the option to sketch out answers using just their phone, tablet or computer.
Enable collaboration between students - We believe collaboration is one of the fundamental skills that can be taught in classrooms, and something that many ed-tech tools don't allow. With Rolljak, students can improve on others' ideas, making ideas evolve and come to life.
Export and archive responses - Easily export responses to track student progress, to mark, or to archive.
Breakout teams - Break your class up into smaller teams to foster collaboration. You can assign teams or allow Rolljak to randomize it for you!
Exploring Rolljak
The Homepage
The homepage appears when you sign into Rolljak. If it's your first time here, you'll be needed to complete your profile and preferences, so we can send you content and resources that will help you mastering Rolljak.
After completing the profile, we prepare a comprehensive onboarding process to get started, from Playingthrough a Rolljak session, Create A Session, or Try A templates!
Session Builder
The Session Builder is where the magic happens. Here, you can create and customize your activity to suit your needs.
There're 2 easy steps creating the session:
Step 1 - Choose an Activity Type
We provide many activity types with its different purposes. You can create a new one from scratch using the Basic Activities, or scroll down to see a pre-set activity from Rolljak Signatures and customize it to suit your needs.
Step 2: Activity Builder - Input the question your students will see here, and decide the number of responses they can provide. You can also enable peer evaluation here. check out the participant's view on the right side to preview what they will end up seeing. Turn on Collaboration and customize the time allocated to each phase of an activity. You can also turn on Peer Evaluation to promote critical thinking!
How to use Rolljak
Let's imagine you're a science teacher, and you're introducing a new topic today - waves.
First, let's test their understanding of waves, see what preconceived notions they have, get them to brainstorm and think about waves and their real life applications.
So we'll start with a simple, open-ended question: What is a wave?
Example Activity: What is a wave?
To do this, we're going to want to set a open ended question and NOT allow collaboration. Just something that they can all think of individually and jot down.
1. Log onto Rolljak and click 'Create Session'.
2. We're greeted with a simple Session Builder, and 'Open Ended' seems to suit our needs just fine. You can check out the Rolljak Signatures for inspiration.
3. Clicking "Open Ended" now brings us to a page where we can customize the question.
Since waves can take multiple forms and we want more inputs from our students, let's enable Participant chooses so they can have multiple answers.
4. Interested in seeing what your class thinks are good answers? Enable Peer Evaluation and set up scales as rubrics to let students grade each other's responses. You can check out the pre-set metrics or come up with your own.
Check out Participants' View under the left panel to preview what your students will see.
Related: 5W1H: Collaborative Sketching
5. And we're done! Click SAVE on the right bottom, and click DONE. After that, you can choose SAVE FOR LATER so you can edit and use it later, or GO LIVE when you're ready.
This is just one example of how you can use Rolljak in a classroom. With it's powerful suite of features, Rolljak can be tweaked to fit most lessons.
What's Next?
When the session is completed, you will see the responses and results on the gallery. Check Reports to see in depth insights and analysis of your session! It allows you to assess the level of engagement of participants and their rate of accuracy for quiz questions such as Auto Scoring Quiz and Multiple Choice Question. Pro and Premium plan users will also have access to activity, participant, and team reports that provide more insights into your audience and sessions. Know which activity was the least or most engaging, the least engaged participants, and those who need help.
What makes Rolljak different? And better?
1. Kahoot
- The popular game-based learning platform best known for it's catchy theme music and funny names, Kahoot is great for trivia games and shines in MCQ (Multiple Choice Question) quizzes.
- Rolljak improves on Kahoot by keeping engaging elements (gamification and catchy tunes), and adding a whole host of features that enables things from MCQ quizzes to long-form responses and sketched responses.
- While Kahoot is a good way to consolidate knowledge and test students on specifics, Kahoot quizzes don't test understanding, promote critical thinking or spark discussions but Rolljak does!
2. Mentimeter
- A more professional platform designed for presentations and meetings with polls, quizzes & Q&As, Mentimeter is popular, with more than 80 million users.
- Rolljak improves on Mentimeter's classroom utility, with features such as collaboration, peer-to-peer evaluation, allowing sketched responses, and the ability to create breakout teams.
Rolljak is a promising platform entering the ed-tech industry. In a world of virtual classrooms, Rolljak serves as an engagement tool that supports creative thinking, brainstorming and icebreaker activities. In fact, Rolljak is the only platform where you can run all these things seamlessly regardless of who or how big your audience is.
With it's robust suite of features and designed with educators in mind, Rolljak is worth a try (it's currently in open beta and offering premium features for free!)
Signup at Rolljak here.