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When I did my student teaching my mentor teacher used the clickers to do weekly quizzes.
It turned out to be a lot of work putting it together each week.
When I left she stopped doing it because it was too much work on top of the other work she had.
She then just used clickers for some daily work, not any assessment work.
Sometimes using technology takes more work than going old school with pencil/paper and grading it that night.
Another issue that came up is that you had to wait for all the kids to click their answer before moving on.
In a mixed ability class that means you have to tune your assessment to the slowest learner if you want to finish the task in one class period. And at some point you will need to move on without everyone having clicked their answer.
If your school is spending money on clickers, they are stupid. There are many free poll/quiz type applications out there that can be used with cell phones or laptops.
If this is for very young kids that don't have cell phones, mini white boards are way cheaper and just as effective.
I love technology, but I agree that sometimes a pencil and paper is just better.
My department is moving towards using clickers and I was wondering if anyone had any experience and advice for me?
(I don't necessarily have to use them, but I get the impression that they might be a big help.)
Thanks!
I actually had to use them in classes when I was a college student myself. They were annoying (we had to buy them ourselves) at the time, but they did keep me from nodding of as often in some spectacularly boring lectures.
I no longer lecture in class but I do use a similar idea in my flipped videos where I use pop ups during the videos. I like it a lot because it shows me the content areas I need to reinforce in class the next meeting, and (like the clickers) it allows kids who are "shy" a chance to answer questions in a non-intimidating manner. It is good for taking the formative temp of a class in terms of who is struggling and who isn't.
I would never use them for summative assessments, however.
I like the idea and did try to use them, but managing them was time consuming.
I have a set but I've never found the time to set them up. I'm not fan of multiple choice testing anyway. There's a huge difference between being able to give me an answer and pick an answer from a list. I prefer to walk around the room and look at the student's work as they work on a problem. I probably should set up the clickers though for the times when that kind of review makes sense.
I have a set but I've never found the time to set them up. I'm not fan of multiple choice testing anyway. There's a huge difference between being able to give me an answer and pick an answer from a list. I prefer to walk around the room and look at the student's work as they work on a problem. I probably should set up the clickers though for the times when that kind of review makes sense.
I'm a big fan of objective assessment questions, including multiple-choice (if the questions are well-written and the sample size is big enough), particularly in content-heavy subjects like history. However for subjects like math that are heavy on performance and skills, multiple-choice is not normally the way to go. If I use the clickers, I think I'll rely a lot on matching (with a few incorrect options) and/or multiple-answer multiple-choice...if that latter is possible.
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