Deep Dive: Questions

Have you ever found yourself wanting to direct an educational question to your peers but not found a suitable means? Do you have a desire to help other teachers grow their understanding of your subject? At Bloom’s Network we have created a way for you to target your questions and help others to grow.

Why have we added Questions to Bloom’s Network?

Right now it is easier than ever to access information online. Need to find that recipe you saw on TV the other night? Google it. Want to learn about that new technological innovation everyone is raving about? Google it. Having the urge to learn about the battle of Hastings on a whim? Google it. However, information from a basic Google search is often best-suited to generic questions. If your question is particularly specific, you may find numerous conflicting opinions or struggle to find an answer at all. Questions on Bloom’s Network aims to fix these issues and allow teachers to find answers for all of their questions in a community setting, regardless of the specificity.

What is the Questions feature?

The Questions feature on Bloom’s Network is designed to give teachers the ability to easily collaborate and communicate with other teachers in their field. It allows you to ask questions to your peers and answer any questions of theirs. Rather than posting to a large group of people who may not know the answer, the Questions feature on Bloom’s Network allows you to target your questions to teachers with knowledge in a specific subject. For example, if you would like to query your peers about the BTEC National curriculum for Mechanical Engineering, you can author a post with BTEC Level 3 Mechanical Engineering as the topic and it will be displayed to all teachers on the site who have this subject listed as one of their interests. Once someone answers your question, you will receive a notification that lets you know and takes you back to the post. If you think the answer is correct, you can tick it to mark it so. This will highlight the answer in green and display it first to anybody who clicks on your question, so that the answer is easily visible.

How do I use the Questions feature?

After you have signed up for Bloom’s Network at bloomsnetwork.com/signup and confirmed your email address, you can log in to the homepage of the website. From here, click on the Profile tab in the navigation bar and select the subjects you are interested in as your Interests. Once you have saved these changes and navigated back to the home page, you will see all of the recent questions that other teachers have asked in this subject. If you would like to ask a question of your own, simply post it on your feed with the subject selected in the drop-down menu. If you cannot find the topic you wish to post about, double check that you have added it to your list of Interests in the Profile section.

You may notice that you can only post two answers on each question. This is to prevent the situation where back-and-forth conversations are carried out in the Answers section, making it difficult for other users to find the actual answers. If you’d like to have more of a discussion with another teacher, feel free to use the Comments section of the question.

Any future developments planned for Questions?

In future, Questions will be extended so that any user can up-vote or down-vote any answer, based on whether they believe it to be helpful information. The answers will then be displayed in order of their score. This will address the potential issue of teachers asking a question but forgetting to mark an answer as correct, or marking an answer as correct that others disagree with. This will add to the community feeling of Bloom’s Network, as everyone’s opinion will be treated as equally valid - each person has one vote per answer to determine whether or not they think it is useful.

We will also be introducing filters to the Questions feed in the near future, which will allow you to filter out questions from certain subjects and/or only view questions that have (or have not) been marked as answered.

You may have noticed a greyed out Leaderboards tab in the navigation bar. This is a future feature that will allow you to see how you compare to other teachers in terms of your contribution to resources and questions. Your user score is currently visible to you on your profile and will be used to determine your position on the user leaderboard. This score will be increased by answering other user’s questions and being marked as the correct answer. We are currently thinking of ways we can reward our top contributors and may openly discuss some ideas in the near future.