Improving Critical Thinking Skills with an Easy-to-Use Tool

“I teach a two-semester course called Foundations of Environmental Science and I’ve been using Packback for four semesters. I use it primarily for current event articles, environmental issues and other things where students will have to post a question from a particular article that they read in a newspaper or a journal or somewhere else. [Then] the other students in the class will have to post two answers to the questions that the other students post. What this does is it helps to foster critical thinking, as well as [allow] students to get an understanding and an idea of what other students are posting. It’s fairly easy to use.“