I received an email last week from Bill Goffe who teaches economics at SUNY-Oswego (and contributed to this great guide to teaching economics with clickers) with a neat tip for practicing agile teaching. He noted that he’s heard Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur talk about bringing to class a folder full of transparencies, each with a different clicker question. Mazur asks his students the clicker question at the top of the stack and, depending on how well the students do, either moves on to the next question or skips a few to move to a question on a different topic. This is a great way to practice agile teaching by basing the selection of a clicker question on the results of a previous one.

Bill wrote that it can be challenging to take a similar approach if one’s clicker questions are embedded in PowerPoint slides. Breaking out of presentation mode, wandering through one’s slides in “Normal” or “Slide Sorter” mode to find one’s next question, then switching back to presentation mode to display the question–that seems like an awkward process, particularly if it’s visible to the students. However, Bill found a better way:

Yesterday I came across [the Inside Higher Ed article] “The Advantages of a 2,500 Slide PowerPoint Deck,” and it had the solution: number your slides and bring a printed version of the slides in outline view. Look at the latter, find the desired slide, type that number, and then PP takes you to that slide, still in display mode. It might seem like a small point, but it would make class much smoother.

I had no idea that you could just type a slide number while in presentation mode in PowerPoint and instantly go to that slide. (Try it, it really works!) That’s a handy trick for going nonlinear in PowerPoint. It might require you to have a printout of your slides handy so you can determine the number of your next slide, but as the comments on that article point out, if you use the same slide deck over and over, you’ll probably start to memorize some of those numbers. (The presenter described in the article uses the same 2,500 slide PowerPoint deck for all of his presentations. He just skips around nonlinearly in response to questions from the audience!)

This trick is probably better than the one that came to mind when I first read Bill’s email, which is to switch from the “slides” view in PowerPoint to the “outline” view. The outline view gives a more compact view of your slide deck, and, depending on how you’ve formatted your clicker questions, can show you your clicker questions particularly well. I think the type-a-slide-number trick is even slicker.

Another way to go nonlinear is to use Prezi. In Prezi, you can organize all your content (text, images, clicker questions, whatever) visually on a great big canvas. This means that finding a particular bit of content is pretty easy, assuming you’ve placed it on the canvas in a sensible location. And while you can set up a “path” in Prezi to follow somewhat linearly, you can always go “off path” and zoom around to other content at will. I’ve used Prezi for the visuals in a few presentations that also included clicker questions, such as this talk at the University of Louisville and this one at Central Michigan University. In both cases, I simply embedded my clicker questions in the Prezi (in a particularly clever way in the Louisville talk) and ran my clicker software on top of Prezi. Worked like a charm.

(See how I turned the entire Prezi into one big clicker question? The letters A, B, C, and D weren’t visible until near the end of the presentation when I zoomed out and posed my final clicker question.)

Of course, in those talks, I was mostly moving linearly through the Prezi. I can see, however, setting up a Prezi where your clicker questions are organized visually in groups and subgroups and using that to go nonlinear during a class session. It’s not quite as slick as typing a number and instantly moving to a different slide, but I would guess that some of us would be faster at navigating visually to a new question than remembering or looking up a question number.

Finally, one of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed article that Bill sent me links to a blog post describing a “Choose Your Own Adventure” session on information literacy designed and facilitated by librarians at the University of Dubuque. PowerPoint hyperlinks (yet another way to move nonlinearly through a slide deck) were used with clicker questions to have the students determine the progression through the slide deck as they grappled with information literacy tasks like finding and evaluating the quality of sources.

I’ve been eager to find more examples of this kind of classroom response system use since I first read about it in the David Banks book on response systems. That edited volume includes a chapter (Hinde & Hunt, 2006) on the use of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style question tree in an economics course. For more on the Dubuque library use of CYOA / question trees, see this follow-up blog post and the PowerPoint deck itself.

Thanks for sharing, Bill!

Image: “Choose Your Own Adventure 1” by Flickr user Jason Permenter, Creative Commons licensed

I’ve often said that those teaching in the social sciences have the most options for using clickers.  Both content and opinion questions are typically on-topic in a social science course, giving these instructors the ability to use clickers in just about any way imaginable.  Case in point: The video below by Russell James, who teaches in the housing and consumer economics program at the University of Georgia.

James covers a lot of ground in this video.  He shares examples of several types of clicker questions he uses, including student perspective questions (sometimes used to connect student opinions with results from national opinion polls), experiment questions (in which students participate in experiments designed to illustrate certain economic behaviors), and prediction questions (in which students predict the outcomes of research experiments from the literature).  James moves very quickly in this video, so be ready to pause it in order to read his sample questions.

James mentions other uses of clickers, too, such as taking a minute at the end of each class to ask students the kinds of rating questions that typically appear on end-of-semester course evaluations.  He says this is the “number one” use of clickers that has transformed his teaching, since it generates regular data on his teaching effectiveness.  James mentions a use I would call a monitoring question–asking students to click in when they’ve finished a particular task.  He notes that this lets him know when it’s time to move on after an activity and that the count of students who have finished displayed on-screen sends a message to students who aren’t keeping up with their peers.

James also describes a game he calls “clicker wars.”  In this game, often used to review for exams, he divides his students into groups, perhaps based on gender or class year.  Each group is then divided into teams of two or three students each, and each team is given a single clicker.  James then poses questions to his students, and each team must come to consensus on its answer.  If a team misses a question, they’re out of the game as a team, but can still help other teams in their group.  The winning team gets some kind of prize at the end of the game, and the winning group gets a prize, too, although a lesser one.  James says this gives students a lot of incentive to stay engaged in the game throughout.

James also suggests a few ways to handle students who cheat with clickers by bringing their absent friends’ clickers to class, making it appear that those friends are present.  Most of James’ suggestions I’ve mentioned here on the blog before, but he had a novel one, too.  He suggests taking a digital photo of the class as a deterrent.  If a student’s clicker says that student was present but the student isn’t in the photo, that becomes an honor code violation.  James says that telling students you’re doing this will prevent some cheating.

Thanks to Russell James for sharing his creative ideas for teaching with clickers!

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!)

Jennifer Imazeki teaches a 500-student microeconomics course at San Diego State University, and she recently blogged about her use of clickers in this course.  In her post, she describes some advantages of campus standardization, her grading scheme, and her students’ (generally positive) response to learning with clickers.  She also describes a couple of teaching choices she’s made that I find particularly interesting.

Last semester, I also made a quiz available on Blackboard that students could take if they missed class; I take the higher of their clicker score or quiz score for a given day.

Imazeki notes that by giving her students the option of taking an online quiz, she minimizes the number of students who show up to class just to get their participation points.  Since these students are often somewhat disruptive in class, this works out well for the students who attend class while also giving Imazeki a way to keep tabs on the students who don’t attend class.

Imazeki also describes her use of the “pick-a-random-student-who-responded” feature of her classroom response system.

I tend to use this when I have asked the class to brainstorm examples or asked them a question that doesn’t really have a ‘wrong’ answer. Although students don’t love it, they don’t seem to hate it either.

As I’ve mentioned before, this feature can help prevent cheating with clickers (one student responding with an absent student’s clicker).  In a class of 500 students, it also offers a useful way to “cold call” students without having them feel like they’ve been singled out.

Imazeki also notes that she’ll have students draft responses to an open-ended question, then display a clicker question with preset answer choices.  Students are then asked to select the answer choice that matches their draft response.  With graphing questions such as the one she notes as an example (“Use a supply and demand graph to show what happens to price and quantity if X happens”), this approach seems particularly useful since drawing the right graph is a harder task than selecting the right graph from a set of options.

In a subsequent blog post, Jennifer Imazeki shares more results from a survey of her students about her use of clickers.  She notes what percentage of her students agreed with a variety of statements about the positive impact of clickers.  Then she writes:

The percentage agreeing with these statements has risen each of the three semesters I’ve taught the large lecture and the percentage disagreeing has fallen.

I think this is an important point.  Often when we try something new in our teaching, it doesn’t work out as well as we would like.  We haven’t really figured out how to make it work, and the students are used to it either.  Sometimes a teacher trying out something new and receiving poor feedback from her students gives up the innovation and reverts to her previous teaching methods.  However, as Imazeki’s data show, our use of instructional techniques can improve over time with practice and feedback.

(I’ve just noticed that this is the first time I’ve blogged about using clickers in the discipline of economics.  I have a couple of economics examples in my book, however, and I’ve heard from several economics instructors, including ones who teach very large classes like the one described here, that clickers can work very well in their discipline.)