TLP Blog

NPR’s All Things Considered radio program this week aired an excellent segment about the use of student response systems (Clickers) in the classroom, even mentioning the supported clicker used here at Chico State. There’s ongoing discussion here and certainly at other universities about whether these devices provide an educational advantage to the students and faculty using them, and if the more than $50 cost of a clicker is justified by these results in the current economic climate. One conclusion that is emphasized in the reporting and reinforced in many of the comments on the NPR web site is that effective use of the clickers requires that the instructor invest time into integrating the clicker with the curriculum to achieve a desired outcome, such as greater engagement or realtime feedback.

Read or listen to the 8 minute NPR podcast and think about how you could use, or make better use, of the clicker technology in your own classroom. 

The NPR story comments are also insightful, including one from Derek Bruff who writes an excellent blog about teaching with clickers; it appears he also has a book on the subject that was came out last month. Book-in-common for clicker-users?

Clickers are wireless keypads used to gather immediate student responses to questions. To date we have 27 faculty and 3,109 students using TurningPoint clickers on campus. Some of the ways faculty are currently integrating clickers into their teaching:

• Polling opinions to prompt discussion and support reasoning.
• Collecting immediate feedback about students’ understanding of lecture topics to quickly address confusion.
• Allowing students to share, discuss, and change opinions before answering a question.
• Encouraging peer feedback and collaborative learning.
• Recording attendance in large lecture courses.

Interested in learning more about Clickers? Join the listserv, come to a TILT session, or attend a training in TLP:

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Learning With ‘Clickers’ Gets Better After Peer Discussions
By Ruth Hammond

This article talks about how the use of clickers along with peer discussion improved student learning. The article is from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3540&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Claudine

Here is an article of interest for our clicker user community: “Clicker U.” from Inside Higher Education. It summarizes the Educause conference session where officials from three universities presented the findings of their surveys regarding their own clicker implementations. The original story and user comments can be viewed online at Inside Higher Ed at http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/11/03/clicker.

You will also find the following related stories at this URL.

* High Tech Anxiety
* Clickers, Pedagogy and Edtechtainment,
* Research Funds for Technophiles,
* Learning to Teach Tech-Savvy Students,
* Fulfilling the Promise of Open Content,