Thanks to Dick Staley for pointing this one out to me....
A few Teaching Breakfast's ago I showed off a new technology in the TLTC
called Personal Response Systems (PRS). The article appeared recently in
the NY Times about these. If after reading this article, you want to see
this technology stop by the TLTC, we have it. We can also arrange for it
to be in your classroom in the fall if you want.. so you can use it live.
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=1084289007&ei=1&en=01fb424ee1f26862