Teaching with Classroom Response Systems
Resources for engaging and assessing students with clickers
Archive for the ‘Brainstorming’ Category
Classroom Response Systems in Literature Courses
Author: derekbruff20 Aug
Mobile Learning Part 4
Author: derekbruff6 Mar
While preparing for my presentation at last week’s ConnectEd Summit, I started brainstorming some ideas for using free-response questions with classroom response systems, particularly systems involving mobile devices (especially smart phones) as response devices. As with my last three posts, I’m just brainstorming here, but I think some of these ideas have interesting potential.
Brainstorming – Speaking of brainstorming, starting a class or unit with a question that asks students to generate lots of ideas (good, bad, or neither) can often be an effective way to prepare students for subsequent discussion or problem solving. Multiple-choice questions don’t facilitate brainstorming, but free-response questions certainly do.
Create Questions - Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives has six categories–recall, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. It’s possible to ask very useful multiple-choice questions that fall in the first five of those categories, although writing analyze and evaluate questions can be challenging. However, multiple-choice questions just don’t work for asking students to create something. Free-response questions, however, have the potential to target this higher-level learning objective.
The Long Tail - Clickers do a great job of helping instructors identify common student misconceptions and difficulties. This is useful because it helps instructors make efficient use of limited class time, addressing questions shared by large numbers of students. But what about less common student misconceptions and difficulties? Particularly ones not anticipated by instructors and thus not included in answer choices to multiple-choice questions? Free-response questions can help to surface these less common student difficulties. You might call this the “long tail” of student questions about a particular concept.
These are fairly basic uses of free-response questions. In my next post, I’ll share a few uses that are perhaps a little more innovative.
Since the ConnectEd Summit at Abilene Christian University in the spring, I’ve been thinking about ways to use smart phones as “super-clickers” in class, leveraging what I know about teaching with clickers in the design of more general classroom response systems. In a recent post on ProfHacker (my favorite new blog), Alex Jarvis describes a hypothetical system for literature courses in which students would use smart phones to interact with texts during class. Alex calls his hypothetical system Enkidu, after the interpreter of dreams in the epic of Gilgamesh, and in the post, he lays out a few interesting possibilities for such a system.
As I’ve been thinking about more general classroom response systems, I’ve found it helpful to ponder this question: What if all the students in a class had smart phones and could engage in Web 2.0 activities on those phones during class? How might that be helpful to the learning process? Sure, I could have students tag photos on Flickr (for instance), but how might it be helpful to have them do so during class? I think a good answer to that question means you’ve got an app worth pursuing.
Back to Alex Jarvis’ Enkidu system. What about the following scenario? You ask your students to find quotations from a text that support a particular claim. Your students pull out their smart phones, start scanning through the electronic copy of the text, and highlight appropriate quotes. Those quotes are then sent to your computer, where you read them quickly as they come in to get a sense of where your students are going with this task.
After all the students have had a chance to find a quote or two, you project the list of quotes submitted by the students on your computer projector and lead a class discussion about the quotes, examining how each quote does or does not support the claim in question.
For added value, you could turn on a word cloud effect in which quotes selected by multiple students are presented in larger fonts. After class, the quotes could be tagged in a “master” version of the electronic text with the claim in question to help students study.
That sounds pretty useful to me. What do you, my readers, think?