Welcome to our brownbag hands-on session to "clicker" technology! A group of faculty (Sara Marks, Sara Levine, Meg Hines, Chris Picone, Claire McAndrew, Andrienne Clark, Bornali Bhandari, John Chetro-Szivos, and Tom Schoenfeld) and librarians are gathered in the CTL to discuss the use of a technology that gathers data in the classroom. Tom Schoenfeld passed out a chart entitled "CRS/PRS Competitive Landscape" that he compiled to compare the major vendors.
Sara Levine has been using iClicker within a classroom setting. She mentioned that the Interwrite system is more sophisticated.
Tom has been utilizing Interwrite PRS (Personal Response System) with 100 students within a lecture hall. The system is set up with the gradebook from Blackboard and uses the student ID to associate the each clicker with a student. Tom is now offering extra credit for student participation. Student participation is approximately 60 - 70 percent, and he is hoping that the extra credit will provide an incentive to use the response system.
The CTL purchased the Interwrite PRS system with 32 clickers to utilize and test with our librarians (Sara Marks and Meg Hines). Just a note, Interwrite does offer the ability to make questions and responses anonymous.
Chris Picone mentioned that he is using a Blackboard survey tool to capture student responses; however, students would need to have their laptops charged up and ready throughout the class.
Sara Levine mentioned that the research on CRS/PRS increases student involvement but the research on student learning is not conclusive.
Chris asked about battery life. When the battery dies, do you lose all the student information on the device? Sara L. mentioned that Interwrite advertises that battery life is estimated at two years.
Sara M. mentioned that the system offers out a Master Remote but this has been difficult to configure.
In the spirit of the season, Sara M. created a Halloween demo session. She walked us through the Interwrite system by creating a "New Class" in the control software. Question design options included multiple choice, numeric, short answer, true/false, and survey. Tom uses the survey tool to find out the distribution of majors within the class.
As part of the demonstration, Sara handed out clickers and created six questions, one question of each type. "Students" then turned on their remotes and she started DemoLesson. Sara then talked each "student" through activating the remotes. As students joined the group, the software logged the students. Sara then started the questions and students entered their responses. Interwrite displays the answers and creates a graph. Questions are timed and if students need more time, you can adjust the time given for the question.
When the quiz or survey is complete, the instructor can now go back into the results and review the session.
During the discussion, Chris mentioned the difficulty of accessing the data in Blackboard. The professor has to navigate through multiple screens to display it. Sara L. mentioned that this technology might be useful for psychology students for evaluating data. Tom mentioned that there is a homework setting. He plans to set up questions on the handout, and students will enter answers while doing the assignment. During the next class, students will then upload their responses to the system.
Do you have a question or idea? Post a comment and join our discussion.
Clair
PS Please note that a few changes have been made to this post to include the term PRS and Personal Response System. The request to make the changes came via email message from a public relations firm.
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1 comment:
I had a really great time. Thank you to Tom for teaching Meg and I how to do the letters on short answer questions. I am going to talk to the librarians at MWCC and see if they can come out and show us their system. Also, Sara Levine suggested asking the publishers to come out and talk to us about their systems. I will talk to them about it as well.
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