We love finding stories of educators who are passionately and successfully using Clicker Technology. Dr Christopher Wiley from the University of Surrey, an advocate for Student Response Technology, has been teaching with clickers since 2009 in his lectures in the Arts and Humanities. He shares some creative ideas on how to use clickers that will really benefit you and your learners.

In summary, Dr Wiley suggests –

1. Comparison slides

This is familiar territory for those using Peer Instruction where the facilitator takes an initial poll before the students discuss the topic in small groups. The slide is then re-polled and the results are compared and discussed as learners have been guided to the correct answer through group discussion. An alternative is to use comparison slides in an opinion-based approach. Here, the results are obtained using a 5-point Likert scale and calculating a mean for analysis. This analysis drives discussion which leads to a second poll with a new mean. Encouraging group discussion drives learning and changes opinion.

2. Moment to Moment

This exciting functionality allows you to track changes in opinion on a per second basis. It’s a real-time graph showing the average of your learners’ responses on a 5 point scale enabling a clear graphical representation of shifting views and opinions during a class discussion.

3. Demographic Comparison

Whereas one slide captures the demographic information of the learner (e.g. age, gender, year of study, etc), a second slide asks a relevant question. The results of these questions are then graphically represented to show the percentage of people from each demographic group who selected a particular answer.

Read the original post over at Turning Technologies’ blog. You can also find the creative features of Audience Response Systems discussed above, plus others, in Dr Wiley’s report Using Electronic Voting Systems in the Arts and Humanities (published in 2015 by the Higher Education Academy).

How do you use clickers in your teaching environment? Let us know in the comments section. Remember, you can support@participate.co.za anytime if you have questions about how to implement these functions within TurningPoint.