Frank S. did a brilliant workshop in the CTL last week, demonstrating how, in the year or so he has been using clickers in his science classes, his use of the tool has evolved. He shared a number of insightful approaches to clickers (“student response systems”) that go way beyond exam review. These are the ones that stuck with me:

• Turning Technologies, our clickers source, provides not only a chart showing the student responses to multiple choice questions, but also displays the SD, mean, mode, and variance responses. Over time, after a brief explanation of those statistics, Frank noticed that students would follow them to see how the class was doing. In other words, students were getting a knock-on benefit of some quantitative reasoning along with their science!
• The clickers were used to explore assumptions of the students about sensitive subjects, such as evolution. This helped to clarify the approach used in the class before the lecture material was presented.
• Sometimes, a countdown window could be used in prompting student responses. This helped students to focus and simulate a testing situation.

Below is an article on a total different use of clickers: for attendance and engagement purposes. With clickers in hand, students are much less prone to the distractions of texting, or sleeping for that matter!

More Colleges Are Using Hand-Held Devices as Classroom Aids – NYTimes.com.