Are You Suffering From Clicker Envy?

You’re likely familiar with clickers, or student response systems, which hit the education technology market several years ago. Basically, clickers allow you to pose questions to your class and instantly receive and display the results in real time. Despite the positive buzz surrounding the use of clickers in the classroom, many schools don’t have them. The reason? They’re expensive!

Thanks to innovative companies like Poll Everywhere, the cost of implementing a student response service is now a fraction of the usual cost. You can even sign up for their free service, which, of course, has limited capabilities. Why is Poll Everywhere’s service so affordable? It’s because their service is web-based and enables students to use their cell phones (or any other web-enabled device) instead of the traditional expensive clicker hardware.

Here are some short demo videos on how Poll Everywhere works: Watch videos

With this service, students can text, or even tweet, their responses to your questions. You can customize the way the results are displayed—the type of graph (pie graph, bar graph, etc.) and the design (colors, fonts, etc.). You can even ask open-ended questions, and the responses will be displayed in real time on a text wall.

You can also customize how your students interact with you in several ways, including:

• Allowing students to respond once or as many times as they wish
• Setting up anonymous responses or link responses to individual students (for automatic grading or checking attendance)
• Moderating which responses show up on the screen

If you really want to spice up your lectures, you can assign students to competing teams. You and your students can see the live distribution of each team’s responses. Below is a fun example of this feature. It’s a snapshot of the distribution of a group of men and women and whether they prefer eating cupcakes or crushing their competitors.

If you decide to give Poll Everywhere a try… or if you already use Poll Everywhere or another clicker service, feel free to leave a comment about your experience.

Credits: Image used from www.polleverywhere.com