Improve Classroom Participation and More by Using Response Sites and Portable Devices
I have always been a fan of voting handsets having seen how they can positively transform and enhance Secondary, FE and HE sessions. Furthermore, the affordances of such systems have been well documented in the ever growing literature (e.g Kay and Lesage, 2009). Yet, I think, the ubiquity of personal mobile devices in the classroom today presents both exciting new pedagogical possibilities as well as an opportunity to build upon what clickers already offer. This week therefore, I want to highlight how a group of mostly free websites can turn students’ own devices into powerful and versatile audience response systems.
Why use mobile devices?
Availability – Today, you can almost guarantee that our students will bring a mobile phone, a tablet or a laptop to class. Combine this with the smart use of group/paired work and/or the faculties own tablets and any concerns about student hardware access should hopefully fade.
Flexible and Accessible – Sites such as Polleverywhere, Textwall (we have an account for this), Socrative and even Twitter can be used to allow students to respond to questions via wifi and text messaging with the results tallied and displayed live, either on their devices or on a projector screen, much like clickers. Yet, compared to clickers, qualitative free text responses are easily gathered and time does not need to be set aside to collect, hand-out, gather, return and check hardware. Furthermore, if you employ students own devices they will be using hardware that they are already familiar with and finally, all of the above sites, apart from the Textwall can be used, right now, for free.
Ruth and I demonstrated some of these tools live at both the T&L conference and during inspiring teaching week and we have since had feedback from colleagues stating how easy to use, yet effective this technology can be. So far, within the faculty these tools have been used for:
- Gathering instantaneous individual feedback and displaying these responses to generate discussion
- Helping shy first year students to ask questions in front of their peers
The emerging SMS and web based response literature identifies numerous other ways such tools can be used, please see the ‘12 ways to use response sites and student devices in the classroom” document for more.
Help using these sites?
If interested, please pop into the office where we can help you pick out the sites that will best suit your needs and more importantly offer tips and advice on using and managing this technology in your own sessions. For step by step guides on how to use the various response sites, please click on the website names in the third paragraph to be taken directly to the appropriate site. The sites themselves contain up to date walkthroughs and video guides whilst polleverywhere and socrative will let you get hands on, without even creating an account.
Useful Links and References (see attached ‘12 ways…’ document for more)