Acadly Reviews

Every alternate semester (January to July), I teach a class of 120 odd students. Keeping track of this number of young adults for two hours can be a daunting task. Additonally, recording the attendance of so many students takes up a lot of time and energy. And then, some students later claim they were in class and they did not get attendance. Acadly works through Bluetooth, and it solves both the aforestated problems quite effectively.

Unfortunately, for Acadly, the boon becomes the bane. While Bluetooth is an excellent device to ensure that only the students present in class can mark themselves present, the bane is that the Bluetooth in the app glitches a lot. To make the app work, one has to close and open it repeatedly. It has to be refreshed constantly. If that minor bug is taken care of, then Acadly is a convenient tool for an educator.

We take attendance of a class of 120 odd students through Acadly. It is pretty easy to operate and allows teachers like me to track all the students present and absent from class.

I like that it allows my students to 'check in' at the beginning of class. I was looking to try and find a new way to incorporate technology into my teaching and this trick meant I didn't have to worry as much about taking attendance.

I didn't like that I had to wait until the class started to be able to activate a survey or quiz. So if I created a quiz or survey or some other instrument where I wanted the students to answer questions during the lecture, like as a pop quiz, I had to open the app and then activate it. It was a nuisance.

I think acadly is a great idea, it's free which is very helpful for educators looking for an app to use in their classrooms. There are a lot of things I want to like about this app, but it falls short of me being more dedicated to using it consistently. I wish I could organize pop quizzes for example, and have them all ready to go so that during lectures I can just have students log in and answer questions, rather I have to stop and grab my phone and make the activity 'live' and then resume back to my lecture. That distraction is hard to make up for, especially with so many other things going on.

I use it to try and incorporate technology into my classes, not to solve business problems per say, but more as an educational app.