Just a "head's up" regarding cell phone or computer-based clicker devices: make sure your local infrastructure can handle them. At our institution, there is poor or no wireless signal in many of the classrooms, and we have a lot of concrete walls and underground classrooms -so it's common for cell service to be spotty as well. (And that's not to mention that some students have only "dumb" phones). If you are thinking of using one of these applications, make sure that your students will be able to reliably access it.
Kimberly
From: Team-Based Learning [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jennifer Imazeki
Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2014 7:39 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Clickers in TBL classes
The majority of my team applications are designed as multiple choice questions so I use PollEverywhere (which uses cell phones instead of handheld clickers but it's the same idea) to get student responses to those questions before the teams start working. Doing this accomplishes a couple of goals. The main thing is that I think it's useful for getting students to think about the application problem on their own, even if just a little bit, before they start discussing it with their team. Because they have committed to a response, I think the team discussions are somewhat more lively (though I really have no hard evidence that it makes a difference). I also get a record of student presence - generally, the peer evaluations take care of that but I did once have a student who thought his peer evaluation score was unfairly low and it helped that I could go back and see exactly how many clicker questions he was missing (in that case, the student did attend class but tended to either arrive late or leave early and I could see that because he had responses for some questions in a class period and not others).
Jennifer
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Spaulding, Kristina N <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
Hello all,
I'm wondering if anyone has used clickers in TBL classes and what creative ways you've used them. I used to use clickers and loved them (as did my students), but when I started TBL it was too much for me to juggle at once. Now that I'm more comfortable with TBL, I'm bringing clickers back. During each lecture, I put up sample test question at the beginning of the lecture and again at the end (same questions). I try to write them so most students can't answer them at the beginning, but can at the end. This will be the first year I'm doing this using clickers, and it will give me a good idea of where the students are at before and after each lecture. I also plan on using them to take anonymous polls now and then. However, this isn't really TBL specific. I'm hesitant to use them as a reporting method because then teams can see answers, but now which team is giving which answer. Any other ideas? Have people had success using them as part of the RATs?
_________________________________________
Kristina N. Spaulding
Doctoral candidate
Gallup lab
Department of Psychology
University at Albany
HU B68-E
442-4786
OH: Tue 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Fri 1:00 - 2:30
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