Of classroom software and assessment

Although it is the May mini-mester and there are relatively few students we are keeping busy with various projects. Next week will be a bit more busy with several workshops for faculty and also for IL librarians as well. I will be conducting a short training (something of a refresher course) on our classroom equipment. We have a SMARTBoard, along with Synchroneyes classroom control software and Senteo clickers. We are all at different levels of comfort with these tools.

I would very much like to hear from anyone who uses any or all of these tools, and any interesting tidbits about using them in the classroom. One of the things we noticed about the SMARTBoard is that because our classroom is good-sized, it can be difficult for visibility with large classes. I myself love to use it with smaller classes, in particular with ESL classes. I have done a desultory search on google for more (Synchoneyes and assessment in particular) but haven't found much in the literature as of yet.

We will be testing the Synchroneyes quiz function this summer hopefully to see if it is better or easier to use for our Freshmen English assessment. We have gotten through two semesters with Surveymonkey, which works pretty well, but is a bit awkward in terms of delivery (the teacher has to send the quiz link to the students). The other consideration though, is the ease of availability of the raw scores/results. Surveymonkey has a download feature that lets you get the raw scores and results along with other information in an excel file. It has also been helpful to be able to print out the surveys in case of technical malfunction, and then enter in the paper responses manually, which is another feature of Surveymonkey.

At any rate, I foresee a future blog post once I know more, comparing one and the other.

"Clickers" in a IL classroom setting; an experience

We recently got new classroom management software (allows for broadcasting screens for students and such) by Synchroneyes, and also we got "clickers," the inelegant term for "interactive response system. "

I have had a chance to recently try these out, and I thought it might be interesting and or illuminating to share my experience. I did a quick google on clickers and IL and some scattered links came up, so obviously it is being done. My particular experience was very interesting because it was for a first-year class, though some of them were upperclassmen and transfer students. Normally my preferred audience participation aid would be candy, but we had run out.

So I started by handing out the clickers and explaining that I would normally have candy. This seemed to amuse them. I noticed they were very pleased about being able to participate in the process. We talked about topics to research, and I opened up the Notebook software that goes with the clickers and entered in the topics they proposed, and had them vote. It seemed to go well, with the quiz question, a pie chart displays with answer percentages and a status count for votes.

I also had converted an activity where I show them magazine and journal covers and identify them as scholarly or not to use with the clickers. That seemed to work very smoothly.

I am now curious how other people are using this in their classrooms, and wanting to expand their use in other situations.