Monday, October 18, 2010

Poll on iclickers

Lots of people, well physics professors really, told me that iclickers were really great, so I was a little surprised on our first day of class when they seemed rather unpopular. I would be very interested to understand more fully the your thoughts and feelings about iclickers (I believe that most of you have used them for two quarters).  So that is why I put up the poll on the right, which I hope asks relevant questions. Please feel free to comment here or suggest better poll questions that capture the essential pros and cons of iclickers.

5 comments:

  1. other - I don't like iClickers because they are expensive and it would really bother me to need to buy one for only part of a single quarter. I flat out can't afford it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. For a professor, the point of having iClickers is to get a sense of where the class stands on understanding the material, right? What my physics 6A professor did was hand out sheets of paper with capital A B C and D on them. He would have multiple choice quiz questions on the screen, then we would all fold our paper and raise up our answers. After we looked around, we talked to our neighbor, then answered a second time (maybe with a different answer) and he would ask for someone to explain why they chose the answer they did. Sometimes, he would have us argue with each other. It was an extremely useful method in my opinion.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That sounds really good to me. Maybe we can do something like that. I like the part about talking to neighbors and arguing with each other. I have tried that in the past. Sometimes it works. It seems like it would be really a good thing to try.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I don't really relying on technology to submit my score, half the time I was wondering if my iclicker was even working. I like the idea of using the paper with the letters A-D or even taking quizes in class and submitting them on note cards.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm not a fan of the iclicker because I usually forget mine at home, and neither my vote nor attendance gets counted. Taking out the iclickers/ setting up the polls on the screen/etc also takes a lot of time away from class. I'd rather discuss ideas with my neighbor without the iclicker.

    ReplyDelete