I teach Computer classes at the K-8 and college levels. Sometimes with my college level students, I sense that they are distracted during my lectures and, therefore, not getting the content. Recently, I went to a professional in-service about clickers (or student response systems) and how they can be used for peer instruction. The idea that I could use this technology to get immediate feedback from the students in a safe, non-threatening manner or use the questions to generate engaging discussions of the concepts very much intrigued me and I wanted to try it for myself. Very quickly, of course, I found the cost to purchase a class set of clickers to be a barrier to their use, especially when all my students already have a computer in front of them.
So I did some research and discovered a couple of services that allow you to create polls and have the students enter their responses without using clickers. One such service is polleverywhere.com (they have a video demo posted on their website). It is really easy to create your poll questions, embed them into a slideshow presentation and instantly get a graph of these results without ever leaving your slides. Plus, you can set up an unlimited number of poll questions for up to 30 respondents completely for free. For more respondents, there are fee levels to meet your needs. You can save your questions for later and decide how you want to allow your students to respond - via text, Smartphone or tweet. It's amazingly simple and has a multitude of applications.
So far, I am using my poll questions to reinforce concepts and engage the students more in class discussion of the topics. I have found it better to hide the bar chart until all students have answered so that they will not be influenced by the answers of others. I realize that I am just scratching the surface of how this simple technology can be used to promote peer instruction and I plan to experiment in class.
Judging from the posts I have found on Twitter, the general consenscious appears to be that the teachers really love using clickers. Students like using them too. However, some colleges are asking the students to but their own individualized clicker for use in all their courses and the students feel they cannot take on this financial burden (about $60-$100) in addition of dramatic tuition increases being implemented by colleges across the United States. So a service like polleverywhere.com seems to be an inexpensive way to use this technology in the classroom. Of course, you have to consider your policy on the use of cell phones, but I have found that students like being able to use them for a few minutes in class as long as it is for class purposes only.
While I am just beginning to learn how to effectively implement this technology, there are two books that I recommend on this topic, both available on Amazon.com:
- Peer Instruction: A User's Manual, Eric Mazur
- Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments, Derek Bruff
Happy polling!!
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