Clickers (Blackwell)

I have used the "clickers" in my classroom in a varitey of ways - quick polls with answers texted in, self-paced questions that lead the students through an activity, answering the quiz at the end of BrainPop videos, sharing their conclusions from an experiment, and compiling a list of "what went well" in an activity.

I started each class with a brief introduction to the clickers and some simple questions for them to answer to get used to the features of the clicker. I used the ELMO camera to take a picture of my clicker, and created a quick picture with labels explaining what certain buttons do. This worked well, as some of my students had never used any type of clickers before.

Some of the challenges I am seeing:

• I am still struggling with feeling like the clickers are "gimmicky".
• The kids (grades 2-5) sometimes seem excited to use them, but sometimes kind of groan when they are asked to get them out. I wonder how quickly they will tire of using the clickers ... particularly as they are making their way in to more and more classrooms.
• Too many of the things I am able to do/ask with them are lower-level (knowledge & comprehension ... DOK level 1) activities. My hope is that as I become more comfortable using the clickers, I will be better able to develop higher-level thinking activities with them.
• I wish the students were able to text in multiple answers. I would LOVE to use the clickers for brainstorming ... and then be able to sort/categorize the ideas. It is difficult to do this, however, when ALL of a student's ideas must be in the same posting.
• The "graphs" of the texted answers are virtually useless, and when I "throw" the words to a blank page, they are all overlapping. Iwish the default was set so that they are "thrown" on the page in a readable way.

Some of the benefits I see:

• Everyone is able to answer questions, rather than just 1 or 2 students
• They provide a quick glimpse at where the class is in terms of understanding.