Using Clickers with PowerPoint

Clickers (or Audience Response Systems) are now appearing in the HE institutions up and down the country.  With these systems, students each have a small clicker (like a mini TV remote) and you ask multiple choice questions during your lecture and students can vote using their clickers aka "Ask the Audience" in "Who Wants to be a Millionaire".  Depending on the sort of question you ask this can either give them immediate feedback on their understanding of the topic or allow them to give a student perspective on a topic (possibly starting off further in-class discussion).

Where do you get the clickers?
Your institution may have purchased sets of clickers (which you may loan or may be loaned directly to the student from your library) or they may have decided to purchase licenses that enable students to respond to questions using their own smart phones or laptops.  If you want to buy sets of clickers then the most popular options come from a company called TurningTechnologies who have a website at http://www.turningtechnologies.co.uk

Where do you get the software?
The most commonly used software is Turning Technology's TurningPoint software which can be downloaded for free from  here http://www.turningtechnologies.com/responsesystemsupport/downloads . The reason this is the most popular choice is its seamless link with PowerPoint - when you open TurningPoint you are basically opening PowerPoint with an extra ribbon at the top.

The TurningPoint ribbon within PowerPoint

I am not going to use this blog to teach people how to use the software as there are online tutorials here: http://www.turningtechnologies.co.uk/support/tutorials .

Pedagogy of Clicker Use

It is more important to think of the pedagogy involved and I would recommend the work of Derek Bruff who wrote the excellent book Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments and has also written about them extensively on his Agile Learning website: http://derekbruff.org/?page_id=2 .

Some (probably most) people use the clickers anonymously, that is they just hand out the devices randomly and are not following the answers of a specific student.  Others assign specific clickers to specific students (using the code on the back) and so can track their individual responses and even use them for assessment.

Personally I have only used the random method and have found it invaluable to engage students and encourage participation.  The sort of questions I have found the most useful are ones that either create a 'time for telling' (i.e. most of them get it wrong so your following explanation is more interesting and relevant to them) or require the students to find the 'one-best-answer' (where all the answers are feasible but one is better than the others and so the students really have to think about it more deeply.

The other brilliant way of using them is to encourage interaction between the students.  This can be as simple as giving them 1 clicker between 2 or 3 students and asking them to come to an agreed answer  before voting.  The other is to use Peer Instruction methods.

Peer Instruction

Clickers are an important part of the peer instruction teaching method. (See Eric Mazur's book Peer Instruction: A users manual or his website http://mazur.harvard.edu/research/detailspage.php?rowid=8) .  The clickers are used twice for each question - first the students answer from their own knowledge, if between 35 and 70% get it right (only the tutor seeing the answers) then they must find someone who gave a different answer to themselves and try to persuade them of their reasoning.  At the end of the discussion time the question is asked again - typically at least 90% of the students will then get it right.

There are two reasons for this working, firstly the right answers are usually the easiest to defend as logic will out, secondly students who have only recently developed the understanding are better at persuading other students who do not understand than tutors for whom it all seems obvious!

The important part of making peer instruction work is coming up with the right questions in the first place (ones that test understanding not recall and which are difficult enough but not too difficult) and that the students are given reading to do before the lecture (so that more time can be spent developing their understanding and less on information transfer).  This is a variation of the  flipped classroom  model where information transfer is done at home and problems are completed in class (rather than the traditional way of transfer in class and problems as homework).

All these types of clicker use can work really well to encourage engagement during a lecture using PowerPoint.  The last time I used them I asked for some feedback from the students and got an overwhelmingly positive response: