Clickers in the Classroom - How It Is Changing Education

As an educator you are well aware of ‘active learning approach’ where students partake in different activities as this method has improved classroom participation. While definition wise it is all about engaging students in reading, writing and sharing their opinion without the use of right technology it is a herculean challenge. In today’s world technology has invaded into every aspect of our lives and helped make serious improvements. Talking about education we have seen the power of PowerPoint presentations and Internet in terms of aiding classroom lectures and helping students gain in-depth knowledge in subjects being taught.

In fact technology has in true sense empowered education and made knowledge accessible to millions of students. It has helped improve success rate among students and benefitted the larger education scenario. Clickers are the next big thing that will transform education right from elementary level to higher education. 

Making Education Participative
How do clickers in the classroom help? They make classroom sessions more participative. Traditional model of teaching was a big disadvantage for students who were introvert or ones who lacked behind their peers in terms of grasping concepts. These students never really came out and expressed their opinions on the lessons that were being taught or even the fact that most of what had been discussed didn’t register with their minds. Clickers in the classroom allow students to share their opinion and feedback on what is being taught in the classroom. They allow students to participate anonymously in discussions which are their biggest advantage for students who lag behind their peers.

Generating Feedback
With this technological innovation trainer can gather instant feedback from their students and are able to gauge level of understanding among the students with respect to the lessons that have been taught. At every given point of time the teacher to measure the retention power of the classroom and work on innovative teaching methods that increases retention. They are able to build more active and integrated learning model that make the sessions fruitful and participative for the entire class and not just a group of few brilliant students.

Summary – In this short write-up we take a look at how clickers in the classroom are completely transforming the education system and benefitting the students. 

Interact Live With Your Audience Using Mobile Polling Technology

Modern web and app technology enables presenters to interact live with an audience. They can create questions and ask an audience to respond using a live mobile polling tool, like a dedicated app or website. Once the responses are collected, the results are displayed in the form of a chart. Audiences enjoy polling apps because it helps them connect to speakers and presenters. Most voting and polling apps are accessible via personal devices such as phones, tablets or computers, so meeting organizers do not have to hold their own technology inventory.

Keep all your attendees engaged and entertained in your presentation session

With the help of live mobile polling, you can keep all your attendees engaged throughout your sessions by providing them the opportunity to give feedback and ask questions anonymously. Now presenters can easily manage all kinds of meetings and classroom sessions by using real-time mobile polling.  Polling apps are a terrific way to bring participants into a group discussion and help speakers learn what the audience is thinking.

Audience can share their ideas and present their feedback

Everyone can share their ideas and present live feedback through the smartphones in their hands. Live mobile polling apps provide participants the platform to respond to questions or submit questions of their own at given ‘polling periods’, or at any time texting is enabled. The results submitted to speaker questions are displayed on participant devices instantly, providing the group insight into what those around them are thinking. The presenter can engage local and remote audiences at the same time, using a mobile polling tool that works with both physical clickers and smartphones.

Gain valuable insights about what your audiences think

Audience response technology lets a presenter conduct mobile polls and surveys. The data gathered from those surveys often provides valuable insight about the audience. Live mobile polling technology is truly versatile and works wonders for audience surveys and interactive voting. Participants can vote online using web-enabled devices like smartphones, tablets or PCs and answer anything from a simple question to large survey questionnaires.

Using A Voting App Is The Quickest And Easiest Way To Conduct Elections

Do you want to streamline your election by allowing participants to vote with mobile devices? Since we have apps for everything today, why can￢ﾀﾙt we have an app for voting, too? Voting apps serve as an accessible and secure platform to conduct leadership elections, voting on motions, and consensus polling. With smartphone voting apps, data is collected quickly, calculations are performed flawlessly, and results are immediately accessible following every poll.

Controlled, Easy Access

Smartphone voting apps allow users to open voting to the masses, or restrict it to a small, closed group. Participants are instructed to visit a website and join the vote. Access to the voting session can be open, or participants can be forced to enter information such as name, title, organization, or passcode to gain entry. Vote administrators can select the most secure access keys and require a large or small amount of user information prior to entry. Additionally, with known participants, voting groups and voting rights can be selected such as regional voting, group voting, proxy voting or weighted voting options.

Variety Of Display Options

With electronic voting systems, users have a variety of display options to share or restrict from participants. Vote totals can be shown in graphical forms such as bar, line, and pie charts, or data can be expressed as absolute number or percentage. Voting rules can be applied requiring a simple majority or 2/3 consensus or customized to your specific need. Additionally, voting can be anonymous or public. With smartphone voting, user can choose to show live how each participant is responding in real time or show only vote totals removing name designations from the display.

Reports And Voting Data

After an election or motion vote, all data is recorded within the smartphone voting application. The data lives online in a secure and protected environment. It can be accessed from any device with appropriate privilege and is immediately available for download.  The data can be sorted and reported in a variety of formats. Additionally, all voting data can be printed or emailed directly to your participants.

Response Technology Creates Interactive Learning Environment

Highly interactive learning environments make teaching a fun and pleasant experience. Classroom response technology allows users to increase the level of interaction between the instructor and his/her students, boosting the engagement level of the learners. Classroom response systems utilize wireless hardware technology along with interactive polling software. During an instructional session or assessment, a teacher can use their computer or smartphone to operate the polling software and to display the question content along with the student responses.

Students can answer using their keypads or mobile devices

The students can use keypads or mobile devices to respond to questions asked by the instructor. The result of each individual response is aggregated and displayed graphically in real time. Classroom response systems can be utilized by instructors to grade students and to assess their responsiveness in the classroom. Classroom attendance can also be gathered quickly and easily using a CRS. With the help of group response devices called clickers, students can immediately give their feedback allowing teachers to conduct classroom polls, quizzes and tests with ease.

Increased level of knowledge retention and better understanding of topic

Response technology greatly improves knowledge retention through immediate reinforcement of correct and incorrect responses. A question is asked to a group of learners, the group responds using the clickers or mobile phones and the results along with the correct answer to the question is shown to the group in real-time. Every student can participate in the discussion by using the hand-held device and their responses are collected and stored in the database for further evaluation. Each week, month or semester, the results can be evaluated through reporting and analysis modules built into the software, or online, where data is aggregated and stored in a private account.

Response data is integrated with the Learning Management System (LMS)

Every student is assigned a code (ID) and his or her responses are recorded against that ID. The response data of the student is integrated with the Learning Management Software and it imparts chance to the teacher to closely monitor the performance of the individual student. Another crucial benefit of the Classroom Response Systems is their ability to generate reports from the student’s data stored in the database. This system makes the entire environment of the classroom exciting and more fun-filled.

Interact With Your Live Audience In Real Time - Voting Apps

Creating surveys and opinion polls can be a time-consuming and tedious task. Over the years, we have come up with the number of ways to simplify the job of polling the audience. Presenters can utilize mobile voting apps to interact live with their audience. You can create questions, ask your audience to answer the questions and to vote and you can also discuss results live in no time.
                                                                 

No limit to the number of polls you can create

There is no limit to the number of polls you can create. It is a quick and simple way to organise your RSVPs or you can also let your audience cast their votes with the help of mobile devices in their hands. Creating a poll is quite easy now as the user just needs to open their account, select the type of questions they want to pose in front of the audience, enter the details and create live polls while the presentation session is in progress.

Audience can use mobile devices to join polls in real time

The audience can use their smart phones or the tablets to join the polls in real time and they do not have to download anything. So with the help of voting apps, speakers can engage their audience anonymously and in real time and can increase the effectiveness of their presentations.

Radically transform the power of your conversation

So if you are talking to hundreds or thousands of people in a conference, then this application can help you to radically transform the power of your conversation. Your audience can interact with you, critique with the help of voting apps and can also vote on the stage performance. You can learn amazing things about people around you in a new and engaging way.

Centralized Storage

Organizations with high employee counts, multiple office locations across a country, or throughout the world require a secure and centralized location to store presentation content. CloudVOTE Content Management Solution provides worldwide access to content coupled with the security international companies demand. Easy, convenient, and fast, content can be accessed quickly and viewed immediately through a browser or downloaded locally for offline use. Cloud-based solutions are quickly becoming the alternative to Virtual Private Networks because they require less IT management and control, saving organizations time, money, and aggravation.

Control, Manage, and Distribute Content

Content stored in the cloud is easily controlled. Content Management Solutions allow organizations to upload content to the cloud. Once training curriculum and presentations are online, company administrators can edit the content, manage its distribution, and assign it to locations, teams, or individuals. Access to the content is only granted by content administrators, so individual users are limited to the content they are assigned and nothing more. To access curriculum, users login to the content management cloud with their laptops, tablets and phones. The content assigned to the user is immediately available of online or offline use.

Protect Content from Unauthorized Changes and Edits

Management teams, graphic artists, and training experts work hard to perfect the company messaging. It is vital that finalized presentation content remains unchanged and intact. All employees must stay “On-Message” or “On-Brand” and changes from one employee to the next, or one location to the next threaten to weaken an organizations brand. Content Management Solutions allow organizations to lock presentations down in a format that does not allow for changes by individual users. With a secure content management platform, companies can trust that their presentations remain pure to ensure compliance with legal reviews and government regulations.

Report on Use

Perfecting training, messaging, and presentation content is the goal of most management teams. It is often difficult to understand which questions and slides are effective and which ones are not. Content Management Solutions provide insight on user metrics such as how many times content has been viewed or downloaded. Presentations stored in the cloud provide additional data such as how long a user stays on an individual slide and what is the average presentation time from start to finish. Content Administrators also have a record of which employees are using the content and which ones have not. Due dates and completion times can be assigned to content to ensure it is consumed within a given date, week, or month.

Faster and Instant Online Learning Solutions

Today, people look for faster and instant online solutions to fulfill their learning needs. The field of learning often leads technological advancement everywhere. The new methodologies for learning have evolved with the development of learning management software. Online learning provides same teaching courses which are offered by the traditional mode of education, but it is powered by the advanced online learning tools. The learning management software is utilized in education, administration and even in the corporate sector to make learning a fun and interesting activity rather than a burden.

Evaluate progress of attendees from time to time

The system is utilized by schools and colleges for assessing and monitoring the learning needs of the students. Businesses use learning management software during corporate training sessions to train their employees and to evaluate their progress through the generation of assessment based reports. The teaching as well as the training industry has greatly advanced through the usage of online learning tools.

With a simple click gain access to range of learning resources

• Store your training content in the cloud for centralized distribution and management.
• Improve interactivity between the facilitator and students, increase retention and understanding of key ideas of the study materials.
• Use automatic reporting to assess the impact of various types of learning processes, teaching methods and help adjust the content quality.
• Create and deliver the content, monitor the participation level of the learners, and assess the performance of the students over time.

Built in survey tools and web conferencing technology

Many interactive features like threaded discussions, online conferencing, discussion forums and various other tools makes learning fun, easy, and interesting. An effective learning management software is the one which is available with support, and which can be utilized 24/7/365. Some instructors require integration with the web conferencing technology to support trainees and customers.

In some training environments, students aren’t allowed to bring their smartphones to the class, or the connectivity restrictions prevent them from functioning correctly. In these cases, dedicated, personal survey tools, such as wireless “clickers”, which can also be incorporated in the learning systems allow the presenter to query his audience while offline, and store the information collected for later use.