Ponder by Parlor Labs

Educational technology for reading

What is Ponder? Ponder is the first “micro-reading response” tool. It gives teachers a view into the 'invisible' process of learning through reading. Ponder's aim is to turn students into more active, engaged, and thoughtful readers. Unlike most social sharing sites, Ponder sets a higher bar for sharing, one that requires students to extract a key learning from their reading (i.e. flag an excerpt.), reflect upon it (i.e. assign a sentiment such as I’m confused, skeptical, hopeful, resigned) and tie it to the concepts they're studying (i.e. Checks & Balances, Due Process, Precedence, Thesis, Counter-Argument). Ponder is a more thoughtful Twitter, where the reward for contributing is more engaged classmates and better class discussions. Using Ponder, teachers and students integrate online written content into their classrooms by flagging news, ideas, information, and opinions that relate to class topics. The flag indicates the connection to class as well as the student's reaction to the excerpt. While they read, Ponder collects data on students’ reading behavior. Teachers can use the class feed, which aggregates student flags, and the wealth of data collected by Ponder to better understand, support, and assess their students. It adds an intellectual, pedagogical layer to the whole internet. • Unlike many e-reader apps, Ponder works with any online content. • Ponder encourages both peer-driven and self-directed study, as students can flag excerpts in assigned reading and in additional reading elsewhere on the web. • Ponder places a high premium on data; both explicitly gathered through sharing and passively collected through studying reading behavior (e.g. rate of completion, depth and breadth of reading across topic areas). • The data Ponder collects allows us to make use of simple gaming mechanisms to create a powerful peer-driven reading environment. • Ponder provides engagement analytics to help teachers monitor day-to-day student engagement and identify students who are falling behind *before* they fail an important exam. • Our teachers also use Ponder to prepare for each class, helping them identify examples from student readings that students called out as confusing or controversial, issues they know will spur discussion. It takes less than five minutes to set up and then just works quietly in the background.