CEL attended a meeting of the Paramedic team on Monday to give a presentation on the use of Peerwise to support student learning and engagement.  Peerwise is a free, online application, written by academics in New Zealand, that allows students to create questions that are answered by their peers.  There is more information in the TEL Toolkit.

There are several elements of Peerwise that make it very useful in a teaching and learning context.

1. The process of creating questions, distracting potential answers and an explanation cements student learning as they research and prepare interesting and challenging questions that include text, images and links to external resources.
2. Questions can be tagged so that students can find questions on specific areas of the unit which makes the learning very student-centric and focused.
3. When answering a question, students discover the answer immediately and also see how their peers answered the question.  This gives students a strong sense of their own knowledge and the knowledge of their peer group.  This knowledge can be put to use by spending more time on areas requiring addition work.
4. Students earn badges for their work in Peerwise and this, coupled with an allocation of marks for participation, encourages engagement.
5. Students enjoy using Peerwise.

We had a long debate in the meeting about the areas in which Peerwise could benefit student paramedics and the team are now testing out Peerwise to see how it can be used.

If you would like to know more about Peerwise, see a demonstration or use the application in a test environment, please let me know.