Did you miss our workshop today on student response systems (aka audience response systems or clickers)? Not to fear, here are the highlights!
In addition to participating in and creating polls, participants heard from faculty who have implemented student response systems (SRS) in their classes. Thank you to our faculty presenters, Jenny Fredricks (Human Development), Joe Schroeder (Psychology), and Page Owen (Botany)! Throughout the faculty presentations, I was struck by how many different ways that SRS can be used to solve pedagogical problems or enhance the learning experience, including:
- Solicit student feedback to improve teaching. SRS provide immediate insight into student learning, allowing for just-in-time teaching.
- Encourage students to pay attention during class time and engage with lectures. Consider incentives for participating or answering correctly.
- Have students provide anonymous feedback on peer presentations.
- Identify students’ preconceptions and assumptions about course material by using anonymous polls, thus reducing the fear of being wrong.
- Generate more diverse discussions because students can see if they share opinions with others.
- Improve social cohesion in the learning community by making all students feel valued as participants, not just the outspoken few.
- Improve critical thinking skills by asking students to apply concepts to real world scenarios or test newly learned theories.
Curious about the technologies that can help you do all this? The technologies that we focused on, iClicker, Socrative, and Poll Everywhere, are summarized and compared in our chart. If you’re interested in learning how to use student response systems in your class, contact your Instructional Technology Liaison.
Image credit: STUDENTS IN A CLASSROOM AT LEAKEY, TEXAS, NEAR SAN ANTONIO. St. Gil, Marc, 1924-1992. This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the ARC Identifier (National Archives Identifier) 554838
Thanks Jessica! This is all really helpful!