But that might be changing.  One of the inventors of Peer Instruction, Eric Mazur, has now launched a new Peer Instruction Network, at www.peerinstruction.net.  The site is still being populated and reaching full functionality, but already has more than 2000 registrants.  The postdoc working on building out the site writes:

• 441 registrants report having ConcepTests that they have developed in their disciplines.
• More than 700 users have asked questions about Peer Instruction, and 1200 have written testimonials about their interest or experience with PI.
• Users from a variety of disciplines, including (but not limited to) physics, law, biology, chemistry, psychology, mathematics, engineering, astronomy, information systems, computer science, measurement, project management, pharmacy, english, statistics, real estate, sociology, nursing, political science, theology, history, art, and foreign languages.

We are still working to register more users as we continue to build out the full site, including the ability to locate and connect with users in your school, organization, or discipline.

So, if you’re using Peer Instruction, or are curious about it, consider signing up for the network.

Here is the text from a press release released by Harvard on the new network:

The Peer Instruction Network, a new global social site for interactive teaching, launches at Harvard

CONTACT: Michael Rutter, (617) 496-3815

Cambridge, Mass. – February 8, 2012 – Researchers at Harvard University have launched the Peer Instruction (PI) Network (www.peerinstruction.net), a new global social network for users of interactive teaching methods.

PI, developed by Eric Mazur, Area Dean for Applied Physics and Balkanski Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), is an innovative evidence-based pedagogy designed to improve student engagement and success.

Mazur, famous for his talk titled “Confessions of a Converted Lecturer,” developed the method after realizing in the 1990s that his physics lectures at Harvard, while popular, were not helping students to master the basic concepts.

The PI technique relies on the power of the “flipped classroom.” Information transfer (i.e., a teacher transferring knowledge to students) takes place in advance, typically through online lectures. In short, students study before rather than after class.

As a result, the classroom becomes a place for active learning, questions, and discussion. Instructors spend their time addressing students’ difficulties rather than lecturing.

While originally developed for Mazur’s introductory physics courses, PI is now used across multiple disciplines, from the sciences to the humanities.

The Peer Instruction Network will serve as a hub for educators around the world to connect and share their PI experiences, submit questions, and engage with other PI users.

“In the first phase of community building we are aiming to register current and potential users of Peer Instruction,” said Julie Schell, Co-Founder of the Peer Instruction Network and a senior education postdoctoral fellow in the Mazur Group at SEAS.

“So far, the response has been remarkable,” Schell said. “More than 1,900 educators from elementary schools to research universities worldwide, including those in Ethiopia, Israel, Singapore, Vietnam, Finland, Germany, Greece, South Africa, and places like South Dakota, New York City, New Orleans and Oklahoma, have joined the Network.”

Testimonials from network registrants suggest why PI is rapidly becoming a pedagogy of choice: It works.

A science professor wrote on the site: “I use the technique so extensively that I’ve moved my lectures from ‘live’ to video podcasts that the students view before coming to class. In-class ‘lecture’ time is now devoted to Peer Instruction, worksheets, and physics demonstrations. Works great!”

At Harvard, Mazur and his team have long been encouraging other faculty to experiment with Peer Instruction in their own courses. With support from Cherry A. Murray, Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), he has even used it to better engage faculty at faculty meetings and retreats.

“We are amazed by the response to the initial launch of the Peer Instruction Network,” said Mazur. “By connecting people who use interactive teaching methods, we hope to cultivate a community of practice that will have a global effect on educational change.”

Make Clickers Work For You:  A powerful tool for instruction and formative assessment in K12 classrooms

Dr.Stephanie Chasteen
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
6:30 PM EST

We’ll show you how classroom response systems (”clickers”) offer a powerful way to increase student engagement by going beyond simple quizzes.  Challenging conceptual questions provide an opportunity for peer instruction as students discuss answers with their classmates, giving teachers a chance to hear student ideas and misconceptions by listening to their conversations.  The real-time histogram of students responses to these multiple-choice questions also provide instant feedback to both teachers and students as to the precise level of student understanding on that particular topic.  Clicker questions can also be posed before and after instruction, giving quantitative information about the effectiveness of a variety of types of instruction.  We’ll share ideas for question writing, give you practice to write your own questions and receive feedback, and provide a wealth of tips for facilitating class discussion and getting students to buy in to this teaching technique.

Register for the webinar

Handouts

I have a few handouts for the webinar, which may be useful.

1. Webinar handout packet
2. Tips for successful use of clickers
3. Bloom’s Taxonomy: List of verbs

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Slides

Below are the slides from the presentation for your reference.

1.  Using clickers to predict the outcome of a demonstration.

This is pretty easy to do, and lots of research shows that students recall and understand demonstrations better if they’re first asked to consider what they think will happen.  This works particularly well with demonstrations that are intended to show “discrepant events” — something surprising or counter to intuition.   Many classroom teachers use a cycle called “predict-observe-explain” with such demonstrations, where students predict the outcome, observe the demonstration, and then work together to construct an explanation.    Clickers are especially well-suited to the “predict” portion of this cycle.

For example, here is a nice set of demos from Rhett Allain at Dot Physics many of which could be done using clickers.  One common demonstration is that of the Cartesian Diver, where an object that has some small air cavity in it is placed in a bottle.  When the bottle is squeezed, what will happen to the “diver”?  Will it go up, down, or not move?  That would be a great clicker question, especially if you embedded some reasoning into those answers.   Ie., “It goes up because XXX”, “It goes up because YYY,” “It goes down because ZZZ”, etc.

The answer?  It goes down, because, as Rhett explains, “When you squeeze the bottle, you increase the pressure in the liquid AND in the air in the diver. This makes the air bubble get smaller so that the diver displaces less water. The buoyancy force on the diver is equal to the weight of the water it displaces.”

Or, here’s an example from Eric Mazur, which could be easily tested using real equipment (left) and another one from Chemistry (origin unknown; right).

2.  Using clickers as an interactive lecture demonstration

A somewhat more structured way to use clickers with a demonstration is with interactive lecture demonstrations.  ILD’s are a more structured version of the predict-observe-explain cycle, and perhaps the only way that I really distinguish the two is that ILD’s are not always “surprising,” but often structured to help students see and apply particular concepts, usually in physics.  Below is an example.

Question via Shane Hutson, Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Vanderbilt University.

3.  Clicker questions based off simulations / clicker questions where students generate graphs or other predictions

But you can get creative with this type of question, too.  For one not all demonstrations need to be with real equipment.  Demonstration can be done with virtual equipment — the PhET Interactive Simulations are perfectly suited for this.

Second, you can have students generate their own answers, and then show the multiple choice version.

Here is an example from Kathy Perkins and Carl Wieman of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

First, they show students the Moving Man simulation, where a man will move in response to the input of initial position, velocity and acceleration.  Then, they have students generate their own graphs for a specific situation:

Then, they use common graphs to turn the students’ free-responses into a clicker question:



4.  Use clickers for real-time experiments on the students.

This works best in psychology classes, or some course where you want to demonstrate some fundamental aspect of human behavior.  One of the best ones that I’ve seen in this genre is listed below, which demonstrates our innate tendency to prefer immediate rewards.

5.  Use clickers to gather real-time data that students perform.

Sometimes having a few students performing a quick little experiment isn’t necessarily that compelling, but if you can aggregate data from the whole class then you have a powerful tool for demonstrating a principle or an outcome.  For example, if you want to demonstrate that flipping two coins results in a greater probability of getting a head and a tail than two heads or two tails, it’s pretty boring to have students sit there and do 50 coin flips to get a robust result.  But, if instead, you have each student do their own coin flip, and then click in with their results, you can get a real-time histogram that shows authentic data demonstrating that idea.

A fabulous article on using this technique with students to demonstrate the Monty Hall Problem (a nice statistics problem) was just published in The Physics Teacher. Students were able to perfectly replicate the theoretical prediction as a whole class, running the experiment in pairs.  It’s a free download, so check it out.

There are two downloads

• Handouts.

• Slides.

You can also download the Instructor’s Guide to the Effective Use of Clickers, created by my group, for free at our resource page: http://STEMclickers.colorado.edu. Materials from our past workshops are there too, as well as outline materials you can use for your own clicker workshops.

Feel free to post questions or comments about the webinar in the comments section!

Have student reading habits changed?

It’s a common complaint:  Students don’t read the book before class.  It’s probably equally true in the humanities, but my main experience is in the sciences.  Science textbooks are dense, full of extraneous diagrams and pictures, and it’s a real challenge for an introductory student to muddle their way through all that information to try to extract useful information from it.  So most don’t bother — they go to class to see what content the professor thinks is important, and then use the textbook to help them to do the homework and guide their exam studying.  But this constrains us to use class in content-delivery mode: If students don’t know the first thing about Newton’s Laws, then how can we do anything in class other than tell them about Newton’s Laws?

Do they read?

Some of my colleagues at CU Boulder studied how students use textbooks in introductory physics (Podolefsky and Finkelstein, “The Perceived Value of Textbooks: Students and instructors may not see eye to eye.” The Physics Teacher, 44, 6, 2006),     Noah Podolefsky, one of the study’s authors, summarizes it below (as quoted from a physics teacher listserv):

In a nutshell, what we found was that few students read the book before class, more student did read (but still not many). However, there was no correlation between reading habits and final grade.  We interviewed students and basically found that they had different strategies for
reading – some read straight through, some read in a non-linear way (going back and forth), some just read the summary. Some students didn’t use the book because they scoured the internet for resources that made more sense to them. We couldn’t find any consistent patterns that related reading habits to performance in the class.

From their data, he claims, it was not clear that encouraging students to read the textbook would have actually helped them.  There’s no correlation between reading the book and doing well in the class, and students are reading in so many different ways that it’s hard to say anymore what “reading” means.  Noah postulates:

I can speculate as to why textbooks are not read, and perhaps not that useful, which is that they aren’t very well designed tools for learning physics. They’re pretty good for re-learning physics if you already have a good framework (i.e., you’re an upper level physics major or grad). But they don’t match very well how new comers (intro students) learn.

I think that this is why we, as academics, get so frustrated when students don’t read.  This is how we learn a new topic — by reading a journal article or a book.  But we’re experts, and we can make sense of the information as it’s presented in the book.  But students are novices, and need more guidance.

So how can we provide that guidance?

One thing that some faculty have tried are multimedia modules to help guide your students in their pre-class preparation.  For example, the University of Illinois has created a suite of multimedia modules, about 10 minutes long, which each guide students through some of the main ideas in the text for a particular topic.   Students watch the videos before class, and take a short quiz on their content to encourage participation. Below are a few such resources that are available online, but please let me know of others that you’re aware of:

1. Physics: Multimedia Modules; 20-minute lessons with pictures and audio from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne.  Published work on effectiveness here.
2. Various science: Hippocampus. Short lessons on various topics from the Monterey Institute of Technology, including some recommended ones on physics.
3. Chemistry & Physics: Georgia Public Broadcasting.  Videos on science, recommended by a high school teacher.
4. Chemical Engineering: LearnChMe screencasts from CU-Boulder. A richly developed suite of materials on engineering topics.
5. Various science: Learning4Mastery website by Bergman and Sams covers high school chemistry, physics, earth science, astronomy, calculus, and biology, though their style is idiosyncratic and less easily incorporated into another class

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Some other ways to guide students in their preparation are:

1. Skip the multimedia part and just record your own lectures (using, for example, Panopto).  See some examples of this in physics here and here.
2. Use pre-existing lectures such as MIT Open Courseware, or other lectures available on iTunesU.
3. Ask students a pre-lecture quiz, to encourage and guide the reading, or simply ask them what was confusing or what they don’t understand.  This can also guide you as the instructor as to what students are struggling with.  This is called Just in Time Teaching, or JiTT. The quiz can be multiple choice and graded in your course management system to reduce grading burden.
4. Have students write a brief summary of the reading, and a question that they have about the reading.

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The research.

Of course, the big question is, does this stuff work? The answer is probably, as always, “it depends.”  There are few, if any, plug-and-play solutions in education.  How an instructor uses these resources, and coordinates them with the class time, is essential.  That said, here are the results of a few studies.

The UIUC multimedia modules have been studied for several years.  One way to look at the effectiveness is to look at a particular topic, and show students either the multimedia modules, or let them read the traditional textbook.  When they did this (Am. J. Phys, 2009), students did better on a subsequent test on their learning of that topic than with the text-based presentation alone.  That’s not too surprising, since using multiple modes of presentation is typically better than only one mode.  The UIUC folks have also used the multimedia modules in several courses — students watch the modules, and then take a short quiz on their understanding before class.  In another publication (Phys. Rev. ST, 2010), they found that students overall performed better on these “preflight” questions than did students in traditional lectures.  However, they have also reported that students don’t do much better, if at all, on course exams (Am. J. Phys, 2010).  Their interpretation of these results are that students are masters of efficiency.  If they’re aiming for a “B”,  then they’re going to get that “B” with as little work as possible.  So, by guiding students, the modules might have helped them to be more efficient in their studying practices.

Another study in Biology (Lents and Cifuentes, Web-based learning enhancements, J. College Sci. Teach., Nov/Dec 2009), some lecture attendance was replaced with video lectures that consisted of the visual of a powerpoint slide presentation enhanced with audio voiceover.  They found no effect (negative or positive) on student learning from this substitution.  While these authors were aiming to reduce student time-on-task for their largely commuter college, this does suggest the next step — having students engage in video-based learning at home and using lecture time for additional engagement — could be beneficial.

So, it certainly doesn’t seem to hurt to add some sort of pre-class preparation, and if you find some way to guide your students through the topic in a way that is more suited to novice learners than a dense textbook — it could help free up some of your class time to do more in-depth learning.

I just had the opportunity to take a workshop on the flipped classroom from one of its’ active proponents, Aaron Sams, and wanted to share a few of the ideas I got there.

First, here’s a short YouTube video where Aaron Sams describes his Flipped Classroom, which I think gives a good overview of what it looks like in practice.

Aaron Sams – The Flipped Classroom

You can read more about the Flipped Classroom at several places:

• Learning4Mastery site about the technique
• Aaron Sam’s blog
• The Flipped Classroom network (where educators share ideas and support)
• The Daily Riff article

First, Aaron emphasizes, there is no such thing as “the” flipped classroom.  Every educator can take a different approach that matches his or her goals and classroom setting.  The way that he does his classroom is that he spends 5 minutes on a warmup activity, 10 minutes of Q&A time on the video, and then the rest of the class is spend in guided independent practice and/or labs. Of course, he’s in a high school setting, so his class size allows for such an approach, but stay tuned for some ideas that I got for use in the college setting.

In order to flip your classroom, you need three things:

1. Quality instructional videos (made by you or someone else)
2. Engaging class activities
3. Assessment to see if it worked.

Engaging class activities

Let’s start here.  What are you going to have your students do during class?  Worksheets?  Group work?  Labs?  The key is that the activity allows you to get in among the students, interacting with them so that that class time is better used to help guide them and allow them to achieve mastery of the content you want them to grasp.   The videos are meant to get at the lower levels of understanding (e.g., “remembering”).  The class time is meant to get into the higher levels of understanding (”application,” “synthesis,” etc.).

Videos

“We don’t use a tool for the sake of using a tool,” says Dan Spencer, “we use a tool when it is appropriate for the job at hand.”  Similarly, you shouldn’t make a video for the sake of making a video.  The pedagogy must drive the technology, not the other way around.  So, what do you want your students to learn?  Consider:  What do my students need me physically present for htat I currently assign out of class, and what I can I remove from class time that my students do not need me present for?  Direct instruction / problem sets / and lab reports, are common answers.

Consider a single lesson to start.  If you want to have students work on problem-solving skills, perhaps model problem-solving in your screencasts.    If you want to guide them through the book reading, perhaps create an online version of the lecture to help cue their attention to the important ideas (this has been done and studied some at UIUC).

Here are some example types of videos:

• A lecture (can use pre-recorded ones, like MIT Open Courseware)
• Video of you demonstrating how something works in real life
• Video of a lab procedure
• Guided problem-solving
• Homework solutions
• Prelab activity
• Exam review

So, in the college setting, you could imagine using this sort of approach perhaps once a week, to go over homework, to help students get started on homework, to get them ready for an in-class activity.  If the videos are useful and help students either do better in the course, or get a good grade more efficiently, that motivation may be enough for them to watch them.  And you can then use the in-class time for tutorials, small group work, or other activities.  Sure there’s some up-front work to be done, but once the videos are done, you can use them over and over.

You can see a wide variety of example videos on the Learning4Mastery YouTube channel. I highly recommend checking it out — just a few minutes will give you a better sense of what can be done.

What kind of equipment might you need to do this?

An iPad makes it very easy.  Use ReplayNote to import a PDF, or ShowMe is a free app.  ScreenChomp allows you to download the result as a video.  And you can make your own stylus for an iPad for more precise drawings using these instructions here.

An annotated Powerpoint is also very easy.   Use screen capture software to record your screen (Camtasia is nice but pricey, Jing has a 5-minute limit, and Screencastomatic is all web-based).  To annotate the powerpoint you can use:

• A tablet (like the $60 Bamboo tablet), though I found this to be a bit clunky
• Activeslate on your Promethean or Smartboard, if you have one
• A document camera (like Ipevo for $69) to focus on paper.  This seemed to be the easiest to do equations.

A webcam is helpful, to capture video of yourself.

It’s nice to have pop-up boxes (”callouts”) to point out certain items on your screen.  You can do this automatically in Camtasia, but you could do it in other software with manually created callouts.

A calculator emulator is very helpful, so you can model how students would calculate some of these quantities.  Just google Calculator Emulator to find a wide variety of emulators.  Here’s one.

Aaron had some tips to consider:

• Aim for about 5 minutes
• Use one video per topic, rather than cramming everything into one video
• It takes about 30 minutes to record and edit a 10-minute video (at least, once you get good at it)
• Do we need it perfect, or do we need it Tuesday?  Be satisfied with imperfection rather than obsessively editing.  You can correct your mistakes with callouts.
• Create PPT’s that have blank spots for the webcam image and the calculator emulator, as well as spaces for working out example problems.
• Think about how you want the final lesson to look when creating those PPTs.

Assessment

If you’re going to challenge students to learn at a higher level, you have to test them at that higher level too.  Use continuous formative assessment to see if they’re achieving your standards.   Have them make a Prezi to indicate how ideas in the class are connected.   Have them work together on a group research project.  Whatever it is, have it match your instruction, so that your goals, instruction, and assessment are all aligned.

So, why talk about students’ seeming inability to communicate properly with their professors?  Because, argues Connie Russell in her article, this problem is indicative of the lack of college readiness in the current crop of students.  While this is not a new problem, the nature of the problem might be changing.  What has changed about students’ high-school preparation in the last ten years?   Well, the increase in state-mandated testing, for one.  Has “teaching to the test” reduced attention to college-readiness skills in high school? Some have suggested that creativity and critical thinking suffer under the march towards higher standardized test scores; that students may not be well-prepared for college by this shift in K12 methods.

This poor college preparation could mean a dearth of critical thinking and reasoning skills, but it can also just mean that students are ill-prepared to understand what is expected of them.  And it could also mean that the “digital natives” have not been equipped to apply technological tools appropriately to support their learning.  Today’s instructors did not grow up in a digital world, and so did not themselves receive instruction on how to appropriately use technology when they were students — how to properly write an email without text-speak, whether multitasking by surfing the web during class will affect their attention to course content, or how to use good internet research habits.  Well, actually that last one has become the purview of the school librarian, bless their souls, but it’s not clear who should be responsible for helping students learn how to best use many other technologies in education.

So, who should be responsible for helping the digital natives integrate technology into their education?  The faculty teaching introductory courses should, it seems.  Not only are these faculty responsible for introducing freshmen to their discipline, but they are introducing freshmen to the world of college.  One of the goals of college instruction should be that a student becomes an expert learner — that they learn how to learn — or how to be metacognitive in their approach to their education. Or, as Russell concludes:

If we want students to meet our expectations, we must give them instruction on what we expect.

That includes the use of technology, such as the internet, email, and clickers.  In fact, one of the most common failure of clicker users that I’ve seen is to fail to explain to students why they’re introducing this technology, and how they expect students to engage with it.   It’s also important, too, to make it clear — to yourself and your students — just what your learning goals are for the class.  And if you’re using technology, how it relates to those goals.  Technology isn’t used just to keep students awake, but to further your goals in class.  One possible resource of interest – Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media (Edutopia, free registration required).

So, while it’s easy to roll your eyes at such inept emails, it’s worth a moment to pause and consider:  Is this a symptom of a larger breach in the college-readiness of students and their use of technology?  If so, consider making your expectations of students explicit — and giving them a chance to become more expert learners.

Image from University of Salford on Wikimedia

Social Media and Course Cohesion

This semester I have a large class with online and offline sections. How to bring them together, so that the e-students would feel connected, not isolated online? Feeling out of the proverbial loop is one of the most oft-cited challenges for distance learners. Traditionally, a face-to-face classroom, “requires a disciplined commitment from the students to actually participate in the learning activities and reach out to others in the class,” observes Cory Stokes, director of the Technology Assisted Curriculum Center, in charge of testing for online courses. In an online course, the onus is on the student to be self-disciplined enough to engage in self-study, often without the benefit of a class community to drive engagement and interest.

Research shows that there is a correlation between social presence and student success. When students feel connected to a community of inquiry they are more enthusiastic, motivated, and they perform better. If that engagement, communication, and awareness happens continuously and in real-time, as it does in a face-to-face classroom — all the better.

So I decided to take my teaching to the one place where students naturally connect everyday, all day: social networks. First I socialized the learning management system (we use Moodle) by creating discussion boards for on-demand threaded conversations in a secure, gated community. Then I looked to Twitter and Facebook as more public and familiar places for members of my “bricks” and “clicks” course sections to sync.

Teaching on Facebook and Twitter isn’t going to be an option that makes sense for every instructor, but here is why it is working wonders to create a sense of social presence in my class:

P2P Effects. On the Facebook wall, students do peer-to-peer mentoring, troubleshooting, and Q&A at every hour of the day and night. I check into the course social channels several times a day, and yet often by the time I see the Facebook wall or Twitter hashtagged conversation, issues and solutions are already being shared without input from the prof. Not only is this a great example of generous community spirit and peer support, but it’s also self-directed learning on-demand. Since research shows that many students strongly prefer to learn from their peers, this is a good opportunity to enable positive peer effects. As a bonus, “students become partners in blended learning” to borrow an insight from a study at The University of Wolverhampton (<– link opens PDF).

Crowdsourced Curriculum. In the threaded discussions and on the wall, students post links to this week’s lecture topic — before and after the in-class lesson or online-webinar schedule. Put differently, my students scoop my lecture topics and Facebook them!  They scoop my case studies and newsworthy tie-ins and tweet them! Students are plugged into the news and they have high-traffic platforms on which to share the most intriguing stories. There’s nothing that delights me more than this crowdsourcing effect, as students work together to make the material relevant for each other (and thus easier to learn). “If Generation Y likes to do one thing, it’s to share cool, creative, funny and quirky things with their friends,” concluded a recent survey (<– link opens PDF) of millennials’ social media consumption habits by L2ThinkTank.

Network Effects. Sharing course information on Facebook and Twitter means that it is automatically distributed not just to registered students, but to students’ entire social graph. A course tweet is sent to all followers, a Facebook post to the course page is also on one’s personal Facebook profile. This distribution of status updates means that course-related conversations (online and presumably off) happen far beyond the webinar chat rooms and lecture halls. Unlike the formal learning management system, which keeps discussion posts behind a wall (what happens on Moodle stays on Moodle, so to speak), the network effects model of social media amplifies students voices across their personal networks. I’ve found this online word of mouth virtually guarantees that enthusiasm for the course (and enrollment)  remains high year after year. But more importantly, it allows students to demonstrate their membership in, and contributions to, a learning community—in a very public, and sometimes even positively viral way.

These three ideas are just the tip of the iceberg, as there are hundreds of ideas for teaching with Facebook. Of course, not all students use these social platforms. Having a course Facebook page instead of a course Facebook group enables non-Facebookers to read all posted content, and likewise, Twitter is also accessible without a site membership.

Although there is a lively debate ongoing about using popular social networking as teaching tools, my experience encourages me to agree with studies that show social networking enhances student performance and enriches learning experiences both inside the online or offline classrooms and elsewhere on campus.

There are many other tools and techniques beyond Facebook and Twitter for using social media to create social presence, including this roundup. However if your goal, like mine, is to meet students where they are, and leverage their familiarity with social communication for educational purposes, then Facebook,  Twitter, and YouTube are the obvious channels of choice.

One of the most difficult things to do when teaching is getting students to engage with each other about the material in meaningful ways that move the needle of their understanding or skill-set. Instructors of small classes and large classes alike face this challenge everyday. It’s not easy to craft activity lessons that succeed in keeping students focused, on-topic, while connecting in small groups or class-wide discussion. We know that active, engaged inquiry, conversations and debates are exactly what’s required for students to retain information and grasp concepts and theories. When it works, and students are buzzing about the lesson, teachers may stand back for a moment and think, YES!

So, how to get that buzz going? There are so many ways. Clickers are one strategy that has worked for me.

Oddly enough, clickers are at base a 1-way tech tool. Teacher posts poll, students click-in. There’s no automated two-way feedback loop. And for that reason some faculty have criticized my decision to adopt clickers, admonishing me for reducing student engagement to a remote-controlled-yes/no function. I usually invite such naysayers to sit in on one of my classes, to see that 1-way polling is not the end of the story. It’s what happens next that is really exciting.

The buzz! It’s the one thing other clickerprofs warned me about: as soon as you open a poll, and again when you display the results, students are going to start talking to each other about the question. Get ready for the buzz! Very good advice, and it proved true of course on my first day using student response systems with a class of 300. For a teacher who has struggled for years to get students talking, this instant response was very energizing, very fun.

There are many strategies to use with clickers designed to keep students talking-on-task with each other. For example:

The easiest method is the “turn to your neighbor” example, wherein with preliminary results collected but not yet displayed on the screen, profs ask students to check in with the person seated beside them, to compare answers and justifications. According to Eric Mazur, the “turn to your neighbor and see if you can convince one another of the correct choice” method is effective because it supports students to engage in active learning and questioning and shifts the focus from the professor “teaching” the material.

The think-pair-share method also works wonders with clickers, with voting results displayed or not, asking students to check in with each other about their responses, then re-polling always results in more on-task buzz. This method is effective because “through this exercise, students get a chance to work through the question, and defend their position,” to cite Brian Young from Penn State (”Teaching With Clickers: Think Pair Share“)

Asking prediction questions is another conversation-generating technique that has worked well for me. As Derek Bruff observes, prediction questions are effective “since they allow students to commit to their predictions and compare their predictions to those of their peers. Then discussion of the incorrect answer choices provides an opportunity to deal with misconceptions.” Prediction questions do double duty, as “students become more interested in a demonstration when they have first committed to a prediction via a clicker question,” to borrow an insight from University of California at Santa Barbara’s comprehensive list of clicker question types. (”12 Ways UCSB Professors Are Using Clickers“)

I also use clickers to help students prepare for the exam (<– link opens PDF), by running multiple choice question polls drawn from my exam question bank. Whether polls are a quiz on the homework or asking students to recall a lecture point, in my experience these types of questions inspire a lot of quiet contemplation as the results are collected, then great whoops and sighs as results are revealed. Using clickers to help students with exam prep has been shown to increase outcomes and student engagement (<–link opens Word doc).

Clickers, a one-way technology, also work to provide timely feedback and summative assessment, letting students know whether they are “getting” the material. As one student commented, “when the prof asks a clicker question in class and you don’t know what the heck he’s even talking about, it helps you figure out what you need to do, so you can do better on the test, instead of like not finding out until the day of the exam that you don’t get it.”

The bottom line is that this simple technology, though not a pedagogical panacea, can help teachers create an active and engaged learning experience. They may transmit a one-way signal, but skilled clicker profs can use these gadgets to inspire a peer-to-peer information flow and create a cohesive, connected classroom.

So, I’ve been putting together faculty workshops (and K12 as well) to teach educators about effective use of the tool, and trying to figure out the best ways to do so such that faculty have a high chance of success in using clickers when they return to their institution and try it. I’ll be sharing the results of this work in a free webinar in October, specifically aimed at others who work with faculty and teach them about effective questioning and clickers. Consider joining us, to get some new ideas and to share your own.

Here’s the full announcement:

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Teaching Faculty about Effective Clicker Use

Time: Tuesday, October 4th, 1pm EST
Register at: http://iclicker.com/newsandevents/events/
Note: Want the recording? You’ll get a download link after the session if you register.

Geared specifically for those involved in faculty development and support (e.g., instructional technologists, faculty excellence programs, or other faculty professional developers), this webinar will cover best practices in helping faculty to use clickers to enhance their teaching. The webinar presenter has been creating faculty professional development materials around clicker use for years, and will share tips and techniques — many based on research — for helping faculty to see the potential power of this technology and learn to implement it effectively. Webinar components will include: (1) best practices in clicker use, (2) resources available for faculty learning to use clickers, (3) research-based techniques for faculty development around clickers, and (4) working with faculty resistance and alleviating frustration. HIghly recommended: Watch “Make Clickers Work for You” webinar recording at http://theactiveclass.com/speaking-events/ prior to this webinar, and/or the video “How to use clickers effectively” at http://STEMvideos.colorado.edu.

(missed it?  You can watch the recording:

Streaming recording link

Download recording link