I always felt that it would be great to make the classroom
as interactive as possible. These
clickers work in a way where students can participate without raising their
hands. They can answer multiple choice
questions that teachers ask. This is
extremely helpful for students who are scared to participate or who are
shy. Also it helps the teacher have
everyone be engaged and not only the student that always raises his/her
hand. From the clicker teachers can get
a better idea of how many students in the classroom understands the material
and how many are not. This is great
because I remember many times being in the classroom where it seemed only one
person knew the answer to the questions that the teacher was going over and
because of that the teacher would continue onto the lesson. However with clickers the teacher is always
aware upon how many students know the material and can decide to move on or not
from that assessment.
I’m
sure as a teacher many times it is confusing to see if the students really
understand the material or not. I have
seen how many times students look like they are paying attention and seem to be
taking notes, but when they are called to answer a question they have no idea
what the answer is. Clickers in the
classroom get rid of this problem from having the teacher constantly guess if
he/she is giving a good lesson or not, the assessment can easily be calculated
from the clickers. I know that this
technology is expensive, but I feel it can great assist teachers to get more of
an accurate assessment of how their class is doing instead of relying on their
intuition. These clickers also provide
for the whole class to be constantly engaged, with these clickers it becomes
easily noticed if not everyone is participating and it allows the teacher to
know how many of the students are even listening.
This is an interesting
ReplyDeletedevelopment of an element of the classroom that has largely remained
unchanged throughout the years: raising your hand. It would take
serious research, but it provides several wrinkles into the
simplicity of the "teacher vs student" idea. It would allow students
to be more involved in the lesson, although I do worry that less
mature students may be more inclined to misuse it intentionally.
I never heard of this before but it seems really cool. It would definitely make a teacher's job easier. My only concern would be that the shy students will remain shy. In today's society no job likes to hire shy employees who are afraid to speak their mind. So while this would make our job much easier, it is not helping to prepare our students for the real world.
ReplyDeleteI have seen videos of this in effect in actual classrooms. It seemed to have forced the students to pay attention. With a system like this in place, there would be no possible way that students' could hide behind the one or two constantly raised hands. We all have done it at one point or another; Forget to do the weekend readings for class, so we rely on "Rachel", who always does the readings, to answer all the teachers questions. This system could potentially put an end to that.
ReplyDeleteI like the idea of using clickers in the classroom! My girlfriend is in grad school and they use the clickers every day for the lectures. Upon asking her opinion, she is completely for them for exactly the reasons you said. It keeps her paying attention and also reduces the stress of getting a question wrong since it is anonymous. Other than the cost, I do not see an immediate downside to implementing clickers.
ReplyDelete