Classroom Clickers

Clickers, or personal response system, AKA Who Wants to be a Millionnaire voting system, are a technology to collect instant feedback and response from users. Two key features distinguish clicker use:

  • Clickers provide a mechanism for students to participate anonymously.
  • Clickers integrate a “game approach” that may engage students more than traditional class discussion

Classroom clickers enable active learning approach in the classroom. Benefits include:

  • actively engage student learning in classroom
  • gauge their level of understanding of the material being presented, and
  • provide prompt feedback to student questions.

The potential applications for Clickers are vast though it has proved successful in:

Lectures – e.g. existing PowerPoint presentations can be easily modified to include questions which can be answered using clickers. Lecturers typically ask these questions to help summarise their student’s understanding of the lecture content

Seminars – e.g. to create questions ‘on-the-fly’ – participant responses can be used to shape the course of the seminar

Revision sessions – e.g. to ask participants to vote on their ‘top-three’ weakest subjects to focus on during the revision session

Meetings and Presentations – e.g. to pose ‘ice-breaker’ questions at the start of the meeting to help participants introduce themselves or as a means to anonymously vote on an important decision

For conducting group-wide evaluations / research – e.g. to gather some useful demographic information and/or determine a relationship between the responses of one question to those of another question

 

Alternative to Classroom Clickers is the use of PollEverywhere, please see post for further information.

 

How to start:

You need to have TurningPoint 2008 installed on your PC, in addition to PowerPoint. Please contact the IT helpdesk to request that someone install this software for you. Alternatively contact LDC to loan a laptop which has the software installed. Once you have created the presentation, you can carry it with a memory stick to the class. TurningPoint software is available on all of the Teaching Pod PCs.

To borrow clickers please contact a member of the team.

 

Online Tutorial 1 – Inserting basic slides http://tinyurl.com/6hrsef9

Online Tutorial 2 – Converting PowerPoint Slides http://tinyurl.com/6yeuz69

Online Tutorial 3 – Setting Correct Answers and Indicators http://tinyurl.com/62opthd

Online Tutorial 4 – Inserting Countdown Timers http://tinyurl.com/66j3nvs

Online Tutorial 5 – Tracking Demographics http://tinyurl.com/6lbhleq

Online Tutorial 6 – Reset, Run and Save Sessions http://tinyurl.com/66nacyq

Online Tutorial 7 – TurningPoint Showbar Tools http://tinyurl.com/4jknnqy

Online Tutorial 8 – Generating Reports http://tinyurl.com/6hgdss8