My apologies to the Teaching Breakfast if this is a repost.

We have the technology talked about in this NY Times article.  Faculty
interested in seeing it or using it in their classes should contact the
TLTC.


In Class, the Audience Weighs In

April 29, 2004
 By KATIE HAFNER

PAUL CARON, a law professor at the University of
Cincinnati, uses them to break through what he calls the
"cone of silence" in his classroom. For Wendy Tietz, who
teaches accounting at Kent State, they are a way to
encourage teamwork and give credit for class participation.
Melissa Wilde, a sociology professor at Indiana University,
says they help her students feel a connection to the
subject.

For these and other professors across the nation, the
newest aid in the classroom is a small wireless keypad,
linked to a computer. Students answer questions not by
raising their hands but by punching buttons, with the
results appearing on a screen in the front of the room.

Although some skeptics dismiss the devices as novelties
more suited to a TV game show than a lecture hall,
educators who use them say their classrooms come alive as
never before. Shy students have no choice but to
participate, the instructors say, and the know-it-alls lose
their monopoly on the classroom dialogue.

Professor Wilde has her students answer multiple-choice
questions to gauge whether she is getting her point across
and adjusts her lectures accordingly. "I can instantly see
that three-quarters of the class doesn't get it," she said.


Perhaps more profoundly, however, she uses the devices to
turn the 400-student class into a sociological laboratory.

At the beginning of this semester, she had the class use
the clickers to answer several basic questions about
themselves, including their race, household income and
political affiliation. Thanks to the clicker technology,
she could collate the data immediately. At the next class,
she posted the results, which showed that, compared with
the average for the nation, the class had three times as
many wealthy students and one-fifth as many poor students.

"They were really surprised and tried to figure out why,"
Professor Wilde said. "For 20 or 30 minutes, they got
really fired up."

"Basically I get them doing sociology of themselves," she
added.

The devices look and work much as a television remote does,
sending infrared signals to a receiver at the front of the
classroom. The receiver is connected to a computer, which
tabulates and analyzes the responses. The data can be
displayed by an overhead projector, incorporated into a
spreadsheet or posted on a class Web site. Responses are
anonymous among the students, but not to the teachers, who
can identify students by the serial numbers of their
clickers.

Professor Wilde acknowledged that because she can attach
names to each answer, "there's a real potential for abuse."
She says she promises the students that for the sensitive
survey questions she asks, "I will not connect that serial
number to their name." So far, she said, there have been no
complaints.

To the contrary, students appear to love the clickers.
Since January, Professor Tietz has been using instant
polling in her three managerial accounting classes at Kent
State in Ohio. In a quick survey (conducted by clicker, of
course), she found that 71 percent of her students said
they liked using the clickers.

Professor Tietz originally used the clickers to keep her
students alert. But she has found other benefits as well.
By introducing a heavy dose of audience participation, she
said, students are more motivated to seek the correct
answer. She will post a question, then tell students to
consult with one another before answering.

"I believe these devices have absolutely revolutionized my
class," she said.

Trina Floyd, a junior who took Professor Tietz's course,
said she was grasping concepts more easily "because we keep
reiterating the information by using the clicker."

Dan Billick, a freshman at Indiana who takes Professor
Wilde's sociology course, said he was wary of the devices
at first, out of worry that they might make the class too
impersonal. But he has found the opposite to be true.

"It's not just some statistical information we're reading
in a book that some other people did five or 10 years ago,"
Mr. Billick said. "It's statistical information gathered 10
minutes ago, and the people providing the information are
people you're sitting next to, and that makes it that much
more interesting."

The similarity to game shows is not lost on some students.
"It's really amusing to click and then see the answer right
away," Ms. Floyd said. "And you're on pins and needles to
see if the score comes back right."

Ms. Floyd's biggest gripe with the device is that she can
easily forget to bring it with her. If she forgets to do so
on the day of a quiz, she has to fill in an answer sheet
with a No. 2 pencil, a method she has come to dislike now
that she has used the clicker.

She said it was also easy to confuse it with other gadgets.
She recounted a day not long ago when she arrived home
exhausted after hours and hours of classes. "I was so
tired, I had the clicker in my hand and started trying to
change the TV with it," she said.

Darren Ward, vice president of business development at
eInstruction, based in Denton, Tex., said his company had
sold some 125,000 clickers to more than 450 universities
(the company also sells them to elementary and secondary
schools, where they are used primarily for test-taking).
EduCue, eInstruction's main competitor, has sold around
200,000 clickers, half of which were delivered in the past
year. The devices generally sell for about $5 and are in
most cases purchased by the students along with their
books. In fact, McGraw-Hill Education, a division of the
McGraw-Hill Companies, sells eInstruction's devices to
colleges and universities, packaging them with textbooks.

Mr. Ward of eInstruction played down the game-show parallel
and pointed to class attendance, which he said rose sharply
when instructors started using the clickers.

Professor Caron of the University of Cincinnati, who uses
the clickers in his tax and estate law courses, agreed that
the devices could boost attendance. "The reason attendance
hovers near 100 percent in my classes is because students
know if they miss class they do not get credit for
answering the questions correctly that day," he said.

In the pre-clicker past, he said, many students were
embarrassed to speak out in class, especially if it meant
admitting they did not understand something.

"They were petrified of looking dumb in the eyes of their
classmates," he said. Using the clickers, Professor Caron
can keep better track of a student's performance and
embrace the Socratic method by engaging all the students in
his law class at once, not one at a time.

Professor Caron has become something of a hero among his
students. "I won the teacher-of-the-year award," he said,
"and it had to be the technology, because I'm not that
good. I've been teaching 13 years and never won it, then
I'm using this thing and I'm Mister Popularity."

Another benefit, Professor Caron and others who use the
clickers say, is that it cuts down on the amount of
in-class instant messaging and Web browsing by students
with laptops.

"Believe me, no one is going to shop on L. L. Bean while
I'm talking because they know they'll have to answer a
question," Professor Caron said.

Chris Jernstedt, a professor of psychological and brain
sciences at Dartmouth College, has used hand-held
organizers as a similar kind of teaching aid in his
intermediate psychology course since 2001.

The intense interactivity fostered by the organizers has
led him to rethink fundamental notions on how learning
takes place.

"We know that physical changes occur in the brain when you
learn, and that most of the brain's activity occurs outside
our conscious awareness," Professor Jernstedt said. "If you
put all that together, you say, _'We really have to
redesign how we do learning,' and the key issue from all
that work says learners have to be engaged."

Professor Jernstedt said that when he prepares for class
now, he thinks not so much about what he is going to tell
the students as what he is going to ask them to do. "What
am I going to encourage to have happen in their head -
that's what matters,'' he said. "And I've found that it
fundamentally changes how I teach."

He said that when he posts the collective answers to a
question, students with less self confidence feel more
encouraged. "I'll hear students say, 'I got that wrong and
I see I'm not the only one, and that's reassuring,' " he
said.

One of the open questions, Professor Jernstedt said, is
whether, once they have used the technology to participate,
shy students will be emboldened to raise their hands more.
He suspects they will be. "What I hear from students is
more empowerment," he said.

Of course, there are skeptics.

"The innovative professors
will desperately scramble for things that keep students
involved and avoid the e-mail and instant messaging," said
Larry Cuban, professor emeritus of education at Stanford
University and the author of "Oversold and Underused:
Computers in Classrooms" (Harvard 2001).

Dr. Cuban said the devices were unlikely to become a
permanent classroom fixture. "A lot of this is what I would
call the novelty effect," he said. "It enhances
instruction, but it really comes down to the teacher who
has organized the material and made it interesting."

Dr. Cuban recalled an experiment at Stanford 30 years ago,
when similar remote control devices were installed at desks
in an engineering building. Professors teaching in that
building used the devices a few times, then abandoned them.
Eventually the devices were removed.

Then again, a lot can change in three decades.

Tim Gnatek
contributed reporting for this article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/29/technology/circuits/29hand.html?ex=1084350
113&ei=1&en=78b19d5179b5c96b