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Clickers Redefining Classrooms
markmcb writes "It seems that teachers may have a new way to boost classroom participation using a device called a clicker. A clicker is a small handheld device that allows its user to wirelessly respond to various prompts selected by a teacher. So when a teacher wants opinions on topics that people tend to shy away from like sex, religion, and politics, the question can be asked and the students can answer anonymously via the clicker. Everything from a simple poll to a graded quiz can be conducted using the device. In the age of cell phones and wireless computers such a technology is likely to be well-received by students, but one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues."
new middle school "hygiene" film... "is little Johnny a h4x0r?"
and did the little girls who lacked daisies seem very morose...
Yeah, we used those at Northwestern last summer in physics. IIRC about 20% of them actually properly recorded the student response. No thanks.
Better than breeding graduates who draw dubious conclusions.
Another way to lower the general standard of peoples' communication skills.
/. doesn't do enough on its own.
I suppose
One of the best parts about class for me is actually speaking my mind and not being afraid to do it. This would just make people more shy if you ask me. Not a very good way to prepare kids for the real world! There won't be clickers at the office.
This is just great. Lets teach our kids how to close their brains even more. Instead of using the wonderfully flexible english language, these kids are going to down to a couple of choices. A, B or C.
Fantastic.
This is a terrible idea. I had to sit through a class at MIT rife with stupid ideas like this. Instead of a normal classroom/lecture setting, where you simply learn at your own pace outside of class or pay attention as suits you, you just sit there and *seethe* and this goddamned clicker thing. You don't really feel the need to concentrate or pay attention because no normal person can come up with 5 legitimate sounding answers for you to choose from.
Maybe this is GREAT for some settings, but this robs students of real interaction with their teachers and replaces it with bullshit polls every 5 minutes. Not appropriate for high school or college, IMHO.
If you want to do this kind of nonsense, the old show-of-hands technique, in my experience, works wonders, provided that instead of assaulting people who get it wrong, you work towards the right answer.
And no, I didn't RTFA.
In a physics course I took at Univ of Arizona, we had these in class. They were supposed to be used as a daily quiz to see if we had actually read. Instead, the system was never properly setup, and there was a fight between the department (which, IMHO, has problems of its own) and the company who made the clickers. The damned things (which cost like $30, IIRC) didn't work til sometime around November, when the course was about to end anyway. And when they "worked", they never recorded student answers properly NOR did they actually record student input. A big waste of time and money - we may as well have used paper and pen. Besides - you run into issues with people bringing two or three clickers for friends.
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
but one can't help but wonder if such a device will breed less assertive graduates who lack the will to stand up and voice their opinion on sensitive issues
Sounds like a luddite to me...Who's to say these kids won't be more assertive? Usually they would not talk in class for fear of peer response. I think once they can express their ideas, and see that the response from their peers is not negative, they would probably be more assertive...
It's silly to fear something for a _possible_ negative when it's completely new.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
I recently went through the transistion in my previous college to not having these clicker type devices to having them. We call them PRS. Don't remember what it stands for..
But anyways, it takes all the fun out of college. At the beginning of class, the prof will require everyone in attendence to "click" into class. You have to point your unit at some sensors and then via wireless signals the computer records your attendance. Thus, every professor on campus is now taking attendence this way. No fun anymore, because you must attened every class, or your grade automaticaly drops.
Of course, this has it's puropse, and is a great motovational tool. A few of my friends have even reverse eng'ed the deivce and when they're feeling mischivous enough, disrupt the signal enough for the PRS recieving unit to go haywire and throw an error on the screen - thus ending the attendence taking or the quiz taking or what ever. I suspect that these people have learned more from studying the device then any bullshit 2nd/3rd year comp sci course could teach them.
Devices like these are a major form of social control. Awful for educational purposes, at least so says any student who's had to deal with the little bastards.
But then again.. when it comes time for me to be the grad student teaching, I'm sure I'll use it. Damn maturity.
My 0010 cents.
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it...
I actually got stuck in a sample class using these, and I'm not a big fan. What happens is the teacher will ask some multiple-choice question, then he has to stop talking for several minutes while he switches to the clicker server program. The whole class strains and points and tries to get the sensors in the room to pick up their answer. There isn't any indication if it was *your* clicker which was picked up by the sensor though, so everyone just keeps clicking. They have to constantly check the screen to make sure that their number was picked up - which doesn't always happen.
Maybe it's just because they're new, but the teachers I had tried to avoid using the clickers for points. I'm sure the teachers got some decent feedback - knowing what people understood and didn't. Then again, they were in my physics classes, so it was easy to formulate questions and get responses in a "short" amount of time. I certainly appreciated that over homework questions. It did help once or twice to let me know I misunderstood something, but overall, they were very frustrating, and grew to be one of my pet peeves.
A) Empty classrooms with mysteriously full attendance.
B) "clicking tools" now loaded in the standard Auditor distro -- everyone in your frat mysteriously gets all the right answers to the quiz; complaints from the rich kids about their fancy Cross ClickBen getting "Clikjacked".
C) Quiz designed to overcome high school shyness about sexual topics mysteriously reveals entire cheerleadng squad turns out for backdoor antics with donkeys.
D) Awkward Teacher/Student and Student/STudent interaction replaced with Awkward User/Technology interaction.
I have installed many of the systems threw out a school system. I can tell you if your lessons are planned around it they can be an effective tool for elementry kids but for college i just do not see the use of them
I majored in Japanese and CS in college (at a university with very small average class sizes compared to large state schools like the ones in the article). The difference between a 12-man discussion section and a 90-man lecture is like night and day. When there are 12 you can tailor your lessons to the room and if Billy is skipping class or obviously not getting the material despite trying you will know, instantly. When there are 90, you probably get to know those 5 kids who are really too good to be in this class and those 10 who use every trick in the book to avoid getting out of doing assignments, and for the 75 students in the middle you're lucky if you even know their names. (My best CS professor, ever, had academic standards about as sharp as a butter knife and lecturers which did not succeed in imparting much material but he knew *every* kid in the class and worked the labs like it was his job to the point where he knew some of the 15 team's project status better than the lazier team members did -- nothing says "I care" like "Hey, Bob, how's it going? Did you guys get that regexp engine working right for the poetry project yet? Time's a wasting, remember there are other ways to skin the cat. Anyhow, if you need to chat about it come see me after class or on Thursday. Hey Suzy! I loved the design on the last project but this is AI, not the perl obfuscation contest. More comments on the magic bits next time, OK? Hey Joe! I haven't seen you in three weeks?. Should I be concerned or is this just 'This is not a class I care for?' in which case I can just give you a B- and write you off?")
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I can just see it now:
CEO: "Bob, what do you think of my highly controverisal proposial for the realignment of the company?"
Bob: Click!
CEO: "What the hell does that mean?"
Bob: Click!
CEO: "I see. Well it seems Bob here isn't afraid to speak up like the rest of you spineless SOB's . You're all fired; Bob - you're my new Number 2"
Bob: Click!
Ok, perhaps they face a brighter future than I imagined. Where can I get this clicker retraining, and is there a clicker conference soon?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just one? Siiigh, here I go, likely to get modded flamebait, but what the hell. I've talked to numerous MIT students (ranging from current undergrads, to PhD's) in several different fields (mechanical engineering, electronics, etc). I also worked for MIT (see below).
MIT is "rife", like many "top" schools, with professors who barely show up for the classes they supposedly "teach". TA's run the class, do the grading, and interact with the students. Meanwhile, the professors are busy doing the traditional MIT professor path: invent something, patent it, form a company, get rich off it. MIT has an entire office full of patent attorneys, called the Technology Licensing Office- where I worked for a bit. They measure revenue in hundreds of millions of dollars. MIT has turned into an R&D mill; the Media Lab is a perfect example. MIT's best and brightest from the Media Lab have turned out...a shag-rug-covered alarm clock that rolls off the table when you hit the snooze button. Slightly clever, very half-baked, and utterly lacking in anything even remotely approaching state of the art in -any- field. But it's from an MIT student, from the Media Lab no less, and their shit is gold and smells of rose blossoms- so it gets local, national, and international coverage, and nobody says "hey, this is just an alarm clock with two wheels and motors that turn on for a random bit of time". Ie, something a smart 8th grader could make.
I went to a college where I was on a first name basis with my CS professors, their significant others...even knew their kids, and I'd bump into them on campus at concerts and stuff. I could, during their fairly wide office hours, walk into their office, plop down on the couch, and ask them questions about the current homework assignment or project. I knew most of the kids in my classes (the largest, an "intro" level class, was 25 people). You know what? I actually learned stuff, and not just what was in my textbook.
Maybe if MIT professors actually taught their classes, class size would be smaller, students would feel more involved (and hence as questions more often during a lecture) and the quality of the lecture would be such that fewer questions would be necessary in the first place.
Some will argue that MIT's professors, focusing on research, are its strength. Except to undergrads, they'll never get even close to this state-of-the-art research. The professors who come up with truly revolutionary stuff are usually the furthest removed from students. "Top" schools all sell the same lie the armed forced do- "join us, work on cutting edge stuff!" Well, funny thing that you join, and find yourself cleaning lab equipment. Hey, it's a step up from cleaning toilets in the Air Force general's jet, I guess.
Want a perfect example of MIT's failure to educate its graduates with real-world, useful skills? The recent underwater vehicle competition where a bunch of barely-literate high school students from a poor texas immigrant community beat the MIT team.
Please help metamoderate.
I have used these for a couple of years in some of my intro geology courses. The companies want you to use them for quizzing/testing, but I haven't found that to be feasible in my large (120-150 student) courses. In my smaller courses I don't see a real benefit to them, because I have enough direct responses in the small-group setting. In order to use them for quizzing, you have to either:
1) Hand them out once at the beginning of the course, record who has which one, hope they bring them daily, hope they haven't been destroyed in the bottom of a backpack, and hope they haven't switched with a friend; or
2) Hand them out at the beginning of each class session you want to use them for, and somehow record who has each one. This would likely take most of the class time just recording who has each gadget!
I have found them to be mostly useful in terms of the "gee-whiz" factor. Students respond positively on evaluations, but I've found no correlation between the use of these gadgets and student learning. I still use them in about 20% of my class sessions for the intro class.
Isn't a clicker something that is used when training dogs..? ;-)
Remember, there are no stupid questions. But there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
What would you think about a device so that students could submit written answers anonymously?
e.g. "I disagree with idea X because it would negatively impact Y's ability to..."
Or more likely,
"Fr1st p0st!"
Anonymity is important sometimes, but it rarely improves rational discussion.
A device that can be used as a testing device can't be trusted by the student as an anonymous "poll taking device". Without this trust, any data obtained is invalid. Good randomized response techniques, used by statisticians, use a method that the the responder can trust and validate with his own knowledge so that the responder can really feel anonymous. An example of this is letting the person answer one of two questions, one non-sensitive and the other not. The person chooses which to answer based by the number that comes up on a pair of rolled dice, which the poll-taker can't see. If the odds aren't even, the statistician has the mathematical knowledge to estimate the answer if he uses a large enough sample. The person can test the dice, and can use his own observation to validate the method.