Wesley Fryer, on his “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” blog, recently argued that clickers shouldn’t be put in the same basket as laptops or netbooks when it comes to educational technology in the classroom.  He writes:

Personally I am NOT a big fan of clickers. Clickers don’t promote creativity. Clickers don’t empower learners to create and share content, or collaborate. I have been in many classrooms equipped with electronic whiteboards and even clickers, where the ISTE NETS were not being met AT ALL.

There’s a great discussion in the comments below Fryer’s blog post about clickers, faculty development, and active learning.  Fryer has apparently not seen clickers used to foster active learning, but he’s open to hearing ideas.   Here’s what I said about these issues in the comments:

Dean Loberg makes some great points above about the use of clickers as a faculty development tool, giving faculty members an easy way to become more student-centered in their learning. It’s true, as Wesley Fryer points out, that for a few hundred dollars, you can purchase a netbook that replicates the function of a clicker while also allowing a larger set of rich interactions. However, basic clicker models run closer to $25 than $70, so clickers can be cheaper by a factor of 10.

Furthermore, shifting from “stand and deliver” teaching to a mode of teaching that leverages the interactive capabilities of a class full of networks is a big shift in one’s teaching. That shift might not be an easy one or even an appropriate one for all teachers in all teaching contexts. Polling students to gauge their understanding during a lecture makes sense to most instructors used to the “stand and deliver” method. Since clickers are surprisingly flexible instructional tools, instructors who adopt them for use in very limited ways often find more interactive, student-centered ways to use them.

How can clickers be used to foster student creativity and collaboration? I think the key idea here is to think about using clickers to ask questions you wouldn’t put on an exam. Imagine providing students with four or five contribution factors to a particular historical event, then asking them to select the factor that was most significant. This kind of question wouldn’t work on an exam, unless you had an essay question to accompany it in which students justified their answers. However, this is a great clicker question, since it asks each student to evaluate the given options and commit to his or her answer, creating conditions for a fantastic classwide discussion of the question. Having students pair up to discuss their answers before voting adds even more to the collaborative dynamic. And knowing the distribution of student responses to this question gives the instructor useful data for making the discussion more relevant and responsive to the students.

I blog regularly about teaching with clickers. If this topic interests you, you might start with my recent post on using clickers to teach critical thinking.

I’ll add here that instructors who use clickers in rather limited ways (just taking attendance, for instance, or facilitating the grading of quizzes) don’t always find more student-centered ways to use them.  I’ve blogged in the past about the challenge of helping instructors think creatively about their use of clickers.  The fact that Wesley Fryer, who is clearly a creative and enthusiastic proponent of educational technology, hasn’t seen clickers used well reminds me that it continues to be important to share best practices for engaging students with clickers.

Image: “school bag” by Flickr user joe.yeah / Creative Commons licensed

On his “Old is the New New” blog, Rob MacDougall recently argued that the question “If a viking and a samurai fought, who would win?” has great potential for helping students learn to think critically.  Here’s why:

Take a counterfactual question–as far as I know, vikings never fought samurai–and have at it. You can enter this debate with any level of starting knowledge, arguing solely from the evidence in the pictures (that samurai looks pretty fierce, but the viking has his buddies with him). Yet there is no bottom to the amount of evidence you could gather or the complexity of the arguments you could marshal on either side. You could talk about military tactics or metalworking technology. You could research the agricultural potential of Scandinavia or the codification of Bushido. You could spin out a whole saga in which a Nihonese armada devastates the Vinlander entrepots at “Perleshavn” and vengeful Norsemen go a-viking into the Inland Sea.

This is a great example of how a simple, multiple-choice question (even one with merely two answers!) can potentially be used to generate rich in-class discussions.  I don’t know if Rob MacDougall has used his vikings vs. samurai question as a clicker question, but just imagine how well it would work as one!  I can see students getting pretty fired up over the results of such a clicker question.  Poll the students, then have them discuss the question as a class, then poll them again to see if they’ve shifted opinions, then discuss further and poll perhaps a third time.

Here’s Rob again, in one of the comments on the post:

The conversations I’ve had in the last few days about samurai and vikings, with everyone from a 3 year old to a professor of Japanese history, suggest to me that even banal questions can scale to accommodate multiple levels of historical knowledge.

I should emphasize that a vikings vs. samurai clicker question isn’t of much value by itself.  It’s the discussion that it frames and motivates that’s of real educational value.  And that discussion could happen without a clicker question, but I suspect that in many instances, a clicker question would enhance that discussion.

Plus, vikings versus samurai?  How cool is that?

Update: Rob MacDougall’s follow-up post, “Would You Rather,” features more counterfactual questions, ones that point students toward social history and material culture rather than military history and the history of technology.

Image: “Viking” by Flickr user hans s / Creative Commons licensed

Maybe this is obvious to others, but I hadn’t thought of this particular use of numeric-response clicker questions, shared with me by a humanities professor recently: In a class that deals with history, ask students to identify the year in which a particular event happened using a numeric-response clicker question.

This question type is typically used in math and science classes to have students respond with their answers to open-ended computational questions, but it can just as easily be used in a humanities class to have students respond with dates (e.g. 1776, 2010).  Sure, one could ask students to respond to a multiple-choice date question, but the free-response format might surface some wrong answers you wouldn’t predict.

This kind of question isn’t limited to events, of course.  You could also ask students to identify the year a piece of literature was written or an artwork was created.  This type of question need not be a factual recall question, either.  You could present to students a piece of art, for instance, they haven’t likely seen before and ask them to analyze the artwork and estimate when it was created.

Some classroom response systems allow you to set a range for the correct answer to a numeric-response question.  With that feature, you could give students a little wiggle room in their answers (“To within 5 years, in what year did X occur?”) or have them respond to the nearest decade.

(By the way, I’ve just signed up for the twitterfeed service, so a tweet about this post should automatically appear in my Twitter stream in the next hour.  Fingers crossed!)

I couple of weeks ago on this blog, I shared a tweet by Colin Morris, a student at Kent State University in Ohio.  His comment (via Twitter) was, “44% OF MY U.S. HISTORY CLASS THINKS WATERBOARDING IS A SURFING TERM. I take back everything I’ve said about these ‘clickers’ being useless.”  After I shared this tweet on my blog, a few interesting things happened.

1. Colin Morris, the student who tweeted this (on the left above), found out about my blog post via Twitter and commented on my blog post, indicating that he saw pedagogical value in clickers but objected to the cost of his clicker, particularly as a senior who won’t use it in future courses.
2. Then Twitter user @iclickercrs, apparently affiliated with the i>clicker company, tweeted about my blog post.  Another Twitter user, @JonathanRose, a professor at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada (on the right above), saw this tweet and decided to see how many of his (Canadian) students knew what waterboarding is.  He contacted Colin Morris, who directed Jonathan to the Kent State University instructor who posed this clicker question during class, John Jameson.  Jonathan Rose then used the same question in his introductory political science course.
3. Jonathan then posted the results of both questions–the student responses from Kent State and the ones from his Queen’s University students.  Here are the results [PDF].  As you can see, only 28% of his students thought that waterboarding is a surfing term.  Also, more of his students than the Kent State students viewed waterboarding more as torture than an interrogation technique.
4. To bring things full circle, Jonathan Rose tweeted about these results and @iclickercrs re-tweeted Jonathan’s tweet.  I saw this re-tweet, then tracked down Jonathan.  He let me know about items 2 and 3 above, filling in the gaps in my knowledge of this whole social media process.

Watching this all unfold has been very interesting, not only for the interesting uses and reactions to clicker questions, but for the way that Twitter has facilitated connections that might not have happened otherwise.

One Last Update: Colin Morris blogged about this, too, noting the importance of keeping in mind potential audiences when using social media.

I just had to share this tweet I saw a few weeks ago.

@colinmorris: 44% OF MY U.S. HISTORY CLASS THINKS WATERBOARDING IS A SURFING TERM. I take back everything I’ve said about these “clickers” being useless.

Note: I’ve had a couple of problems with this blog recently–the RSS feed stopped working and I haven’t had any time to post.  I’ve now fixed both problems.

I’m a huge fan of the World’s Technology Podcast from the BBC and PRI.  Clark Boyd puts together a great collection of technology stories from around the world every week–not the usual stories about the latest gadgets, but stories about how technology is impacting society and culture around the world.  Great stuff.

A couple of months back Clark ran a story on Chinese students using cell phones to cheat.  I tweeted Clark and suggested that he take a look at some of the positive ways teachers are using cell phones in the class room.  I recommended he take a look at what Greg Kulowiec has been doing in his 9th grade history classes in Massachusetts.  I’ve blogged about Greg’s use of Poll Everywhere, and Greg’s posted a great video showing how he uses this text-messaging-based response system to ask his students ethical questions about the Holocaust.

Well, Clark Boyd took me up on my recommendation and interviewed Greg about his use of technology in his classes.  The interview ran near the beginning of episode 256 of Clark’s podcast.  Greg talks about how he had his students use their cell phones during class to call people they knew and quiz them about the US Constitution and how he uses his students’ cell phones as part of a classroom response system to engage them during class.

Greg also describes a couple of ways to leverage his students’ cell phones’ camera functions.  He had his students take photos during a class trip to the New England Aquarium and send them to Greg’s Evernote account for later use in an Animoto video, for instance.  He also plans to have his students create their own Evernote accounts so they can take photos of references as they do research, send those photos to their Evernote accounts, and use Evernote’s tagging ability to organize their research notes.  Very cool stuff.  I think it’s time I signed up for an Evernote account.

Props to Clark Boyd for being open to listener suggestions and to Greg Kulowiec for being willing to share his innovative uses of technology.  You can follow Greg’s continuing experiments on his blog, The History 2.0 Classroom.

Here are a couple more clicker questions I tried out in my cryptography class recently.

“Cryptography was the decisive factor in the Allied victory in World War Two.”

1. Strongly agree
2. Agree
3. Disagree
4. Strongly disagree

Surprisingly, most students agreed or strongly agreed with this statement.  Arguments for this statement focused either on the tactical role of information gained via code-breaking in particularly important battles (e.g. Midway) or the more generally important role of military intelligence.  Arguments against this statement included the assertion that cryptography may have shortened the duration of the war but did not change its outcome.

Given the lopsided results, I asked for those who agreed with the statement to provide some reasons for their answers.  After hearing from a few students, I then asked those who disagreed with the statement to argue their side.  This didn’t quite generate the discussion I had hoped it would, so I asked those who strongly agreed with the statement to state their reasons.  This back and forth went well enough, but it probably would have worked better had I asked the students to respond more directly to each other’s arguments.  Had the results been more split, this approach would likely have worked very well.  As it was, it probably would have helped for me to play devil’s advocate more actively by defending the “disagree” response.

As you can tell, the question above reads like an opinion question but really calls for critical thinking!

Here are two more clicker questions that go together and worked very well:

Singh writes on page 149 that “the creative codebreaker must ‘perforce commune daily with dark spirits to accomplish his feats of mental ju-jitsu.’”  Which is more important to successful codebreaking–logic or creativity?

1. Logic
2. Creativity
3. Both are equally important.

How would you have answered the previous question before you took this course?

1. Logic
2. Creativity
3. Both are equally important.

I only had a couple of minutes for these two questions, which didn’t provide much time for discussion.  However, the results of the two questions were very different, which was fascinating!  For the first question, most students said that both logic and creativity are equally important in breaking codes.  For the second question, most students indicated they would have said logic was more important than creativity.  The shift was fairly dramatic–over 60% of students chose “both” on the first question and similar numbers chose “logic” on the second question.

I asked my students why their perspectives changed since the course began.  They indicated that learning about the invention of ciphers as well as understanding how difficult it has been and is to break ciphers, their appreciation of the role of creativity has grown.  Inventing a new, secure cipher takes a creative act, so breaking that cipher also takes creativity.  Their own experiences breaking codes this semester in the problem sets have reinforced the notion that creativity is essential.

I hope that this question provided my students with a “metacognitive moment”–a chance to step back and consider what (and, to some extent, how) they have learned in this course.  The dramatic difference in the results of this question likely enhanced this “learning about learning” to the extent that it occurred.

Have you used clickers to help create “metacognitive moments” in your teaching?

You may have noticed I haven’t been blogging as frequently this summer.  That due, in part, to the fact that I’m teaching a summer school course on the history and mathematics of cryptography.  Monday night I broke out a set of clickers for use in the three-hour class session.  Since the course is not just a math course, but a history course, as well, this gave me the chance to try my hand at writing and using clicker questions that didn’t have single correct answers.  Most were what are often called “one-best-answer” questions, questions where the students must select the one response they feel best answers the questions from several responses that have merit.  Here’s an example:

Which of the following was the most significant factor in the Allies’ cryptography victory over Germany?

1. The Germans’ codebreaking efforts were not centralized like the Allies’.
2. The Germans were the attackers, not the defenders.
3. The Germans excluded groups of people from their cipher bureaus.
4. The Germans had difficulty facing the possibility that their ciphers could be broken.

When my students responded to this question, there was a clear majority for reason #4.  It’s likely the students were influenced by our textbook, the author of which makes a good case for reason #4 but doesn’t discuss reasons #1, 2, or 3 in as much depth.

I think it’s important to consider how to handle a situation like this where the textbook author leans in a particular direction.  Had I asked this as a ranking question, in which students were asked to rank the four reasons in order of importance, choice #4 would still have been the clear winner, but the relative positions of choices #1, 2, and 3 would have been worth discussing.  Re-voting after that discussion might have yielded less support for choice #4, helping students see some of the complexities of the question not addressed in the textbook.  I’ll give that a try next time around.

Here’s another example:

Why might the Americans and French conclude that the Enigma cipher was unbreakable prior to the start of World War Two?  (Select the strongest reason.)

1. They were intimidated by the fact that it was produced by a machine.
2. They lacked information that could only be obtained by espionage.
3. Not at war, they weren’t motivated to persevere.
4. They didn’t take the multi-disciplinary approach the British did.
5. They didn’t have a couple hundred years to spare as with the Vigenere cipher.

As with the previous question, the textbook author argues persuasively for a particular choice (#3 in this case), which affected the results.  Choice #3 was indeed most popular, but a few students indicated that the lack of motivation mentioned in choice #3 might have led to the issues described in the other choices.

It’s worth noting that the answer choices above were adapted from student responses to a pre-class reading question (one using the same question prompt, but open-ended).  When I pointed this out to the students, it seemed that the students were perhaps a little engaged because their peers’ opinions were expressly used in the construction of the question.

How have you used one-best-answer questions?  Have you encountered the problem of the textbook influencing students perhaps more than it should?

I just discovered a blog post by Ann M. Little, a historian at Colorado State University, expressing a fair amount of skepticism about the use of classroom response systems in humanities courses.  There was even greater skepticism in the 50 comments her post received.  Since most of the comments seem to have been made by teachers with no experience using clickers, I thought I would chime in with some reasons why clickers can work very well in college classrooms, particularly humanities classrooms.  I had a lot to say, and, since I’m often asked “Why clickers?” I thought I would reproduce my comments here.

I’m a little late to this discussion, having just found it on a Google blog search, but I’ll agree with Joseph Axenroth and say that classroom response systems can be very effective tools for generating personal reflection, small-group discussion, and classwide discussion in classes both large and small, in the sciences as well as in the humanities.

Attending a lecture and taking notes works very well for some students, particularly the students who go on to careers in academia. They’re able to assimilate and process the information shared in the lecture as it comes to them and/or after class as they review their notes. Many students, however, benefit from more active processing of information during classtime, when their classmates and their instructors are available to help them process.

A well-crafted clicker question can go a long way in helping students make sense of new information during class. Let’s say you pose a multiple-choice question for which there is no single correct answer but for which there are perhaps more justifiable answers and less justifiable answers. Something like “Which of the following motivations best explains so-and-so’s actions in such-and-such novel?” Instead of posing this question, hoping that all your students take a moment to think about it, then hearing from the handful of students who have the time and courage to share a response, suppose you ask all of your students to respond to it using their clickers.

Sure, some students might just press a button, but since you’re using the clickers, you communicate a message to the students that you really do want to hear from all of them, not just the ones who raise their hands. Not only that, you’re giving each student a chance to consider the question, weigh arguments for and against each answer choice, and commit to what s/he thinks is the best answer–all before s/he hears what the other students think about the question.

All students are thus given a chance to respond independently to the question, which helps prepare them to engage more seriously with any discussion (small-group or classwide) of the question that follows. They’ve had time to formulate something to contribute to that discussion, and they’re more invested in the topic at hand since they’ve had to commit to an answer.

Furthermore, since their responses can be tracked, you can hold them accountable for their participation, which motivates them to participate. And since their responses aren’t identified to their peers, it creates a safer environment for risk-taking, since many students are hesitant to appear looking ignorant in front of their peers by volunteering a wrong answer.

The bar chart showing the distribution of responses gives you a quick sense of how your students are approaching the question at hand, and you can then respond to those results to guide the discussion in productive ways. For instance, if one of the options is a reasonable one, but wasn’t selected by many students, you can play devil’s advocate and help them reconsider that option.

Also, when multiple answers are popular, the bar chart shows students (a) that they’re not alone in their confusion and (b) that the question is one worth considering since their peers have such different views of it. This, too, can motivate students to participate in subsequent discussions.

And since students expect multiple-choice questions to have single correct answers (and, in fact, often expect every task or challenge to have a single correct answer, one that should be memorized and regurgitated on a test), when you tell them that the clicker question you’ve been discussing with them doesn’t have a single correct answer, you’re creating conditions that can have a very positive impact on their intellectual development!

I could go on, but I hope that some of the pedagogical benefits of classroom response systems are starting to become clear. These systems are popular in the natural and social sciences, but I would argue they have great potential for helping to create productive classroom dynamics in the humanities, particularly through the use of questions without single correct answers.

As Joseph Axenroth said, the technology is just a tool. A chalkboard is a tool, too, one that can be used in pedagogically productive ways or in pedagogically unproductive ways. As noted above, some of the criticisms of clickers stem from the less than ideal ways some universities and colleges relate to instructional technologies. That certainly occurs, which is why it’s important to implement clickers in sensible ways, opening up the door to the pedagogical benefits I’ve mentioned here.

Also, I’ll point out that your basic clicker runs about $20-25, not $60. Most of the systems available now are extremely fast, reliable, and easy to use. There are also systems that allow students to submit their responses via text-messaging or the Web, so students can use existing devices (cell phones, laptops) instead of clickers. So there are options for implementing the technology sensibly.

Monica Rankin has received some attention for her use of Twitter in the introductory history course she taught this spring at the University of Texas-Dallas, in part because Kim Smith, a UT-Dallas graduate student in the Emerging Media and Communication program, produced a video about Dr. Rankin’s “Twitter experiment” and posted it on YouTube.  I highly recommend you watch this five-minute video since it provides a useful overview of Dr. Rankin’s use of Twitter as backchannel during class.

Dr. Rankin has also posted some additional thoughts about her use of Twitter that are worth reading.  Following up on my musings about the use of Twitter in the classroom in an early blog post, I have a few comments and questions about Rankin’s experiment.

First, however, I’ll point out that given the fairly broad definition I like to use for “classroom response system,” the use of Twitter in the classroom is most definitely on-topic for this blog!  In case you were wondering…

Rankin notes that her Monday and Wednesday classes followed a traditional lecture model.  It was in her Friday classes that she used Twitter and required her students to read historical essays and primary source documents.  She had her students “do the reading” on Fridays to help them prepare to engage in small-group, large-group, and Twitter-based discussions.  (She gave an open-notes quiz at the start of class to hold them accountable for the reading.)  This aligns quite well with Eric Mazur’s transfer-assimilation model of learning: Rankin used the Monday and Wednesday lectures and the pre-class readings to transfer information to the students and the Friday discussions to help students assimilate that information.  I wonder, however, if she might have had her students “do the reading” prior to the Monday and Wednesday classes, opening up the option of discussions (small-group, large-group, and Twitter-based) in those classes.

Rankin also notes that most of her students were not already Twitter users at the start of the semester.  They were, however, familiar with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, so the concept behind Twitter wasn’t entirely alien to them.  However, this meant that most students had to sign up for new Twitter accounts for Rankin’s course.  One of the aspects of Twitter that Dan Cohen noted in his crowdsourcing-via-Twitter experiment is the “multiplier effect,” in which a comment made on Twitter is “retweeted” (forwarded, to use email lingo) by those who follow the person that made the comment.  This allows comments to spread very rapidly through social networks and can bring many people into a conversation on Twitter very quickly.  Since Rankin’s students were mostly new to Twitter, this meant they likely had few followers on Twitter and thus the multiplier effect apparently not much of a factor in her course.  Rankin notes that she plans to use Twitter again this fall.  I wonder if she and her students will have enough followers in the fall to see how the multiplier effect might enhance or detract from her use of Twitter in the classroom.

The upside of having students create Twitter accounts for the course was that students could “Tweet” their comments during discussion without worrying what their friends outside of the class thought about their comments.  Students already using Twitter who had friends following them on Twitter might have been more circumspect regarding their comments.  Rankin might find this more of an issue in the fall, as more students begin using Twitter.  I’ve heard many students comment that they don’t like faculty to contact them on Facebook because they see Facebook as their social space and they don’t appreciate faculty intruding into that space.  Right now, students don’t see Twitter as “their” space, I think, but that might change as more of them start using it.  There might be some pushback from students regarding educational uses of Twitter in the fall.

Rankin provides a few practical tips for using Twitter in the classroom, too.

• It’s important that students tag their posts with a “hashtag” so that they can be found easily by other students through Twitter’s search tool.  Rankin took the step of using a different hashtag each week during the course, providing a way for students to also find their peers’ comments on particular topics in the course more easily (during, say, exam review time).
• Rankin displayed her students’ Twitter stream during class on the classroom projector system via Tweetdeck, a program that provides a fair amount of flexibility for finding and displaying Twitter content.  This meant that students without laptops or smart phones could see the conversation unfold while contributing to it via text-messaging on their regular mobile phones.  Rankin points out that the font size on Tweetdeck was small, however, leading me to think there’s an opportunity here to develop a Twitter application customized for classroom display.
• I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that the problem with responses to open-ended questions collected via classroom response systems is that there’s no easy way to make sense of these responses on the fly during class.  (In contrast, the bar chart that shows the responses to a multiple-choice question aggregates those responses very nicely.)  How did Dr. Rankin get around this?  She had her TA monitor the Twitter conversation during class, post comments, respond to questions, and notify Rankin (who would circulate among the students during class) of Twitter comments worth addressing to the whole class.  I think this is a great solution, and it’s a nice example of team-teaching.  (In fact, those who are already team-teaching classes might consider trying this out!)
• Rankin and her TA also used Twitter’s “favorites” feature to mark student comments that were particularly insightful or useful.  This is another way to make sense of student responses to open-ended questions, particularly looking ahead to students’ use of these responses as they study after class.

What’s unclear in Rankin’s reflections is how the Twitter discussion impacted the small-group and classwide discussion and vice versa.  It’s clear that there were such impacts, but I think collecting some data on this would be useful.  Since Twitter provides a record of student comments (who said what when, as well as who replied to whom), it’s a great source of data for investigating how students learn in this environment and what the discussion dynamics are.

Rankin notes that she provided her students with discussion topics to frame the small-group and Twitter-based discussion, but she doesn’t go into detail about these topics.  I wonder if particular types of topics or discussion questions work better or worse for encouraging meaningful Twitter conversation.  There’s another project waiting for someone!

What are your thoughts on the use of Twitter in the classroom to faciliate discussion?