The increased interest in classroom response systems is intriguing to me. Breaking the mold of straight-up, non-stop lectures by polling the audience has obvious benefits, like getting a glimpse at knowing what your students know (and don’t know) in real-time. Previous experiments in the 1970s with “classrooms of the future” equipped with audience response buttons hardwired into the tables have been replaced by the new infrared or radio-frequency wireless handheld remotes (“clickers”). Much improved software that integrates with PowerPoint makes it easy to ask a question and generate an audience response graph instantly.

But there are obvious disadvantages of clickers, most notably that you’re limited to multiple choice questions that have simple A, B, C, D types of answers. Writing a multiple choice question that is valid and diagnostically helpful is a challenge, as it presumes you know what all the common misconceptions and pitfalls are. Even if students aren’t guessing when they respond, you don’t necessarily know why they “voted” the way they did. Where did they go wrong? Was it a calculation error or are they amazingly creative?

I am very excited to see how many of our HP Technology for Teaching faculty are using Tablet PCs to gather real-time classroom responses. With a Tablet PC (and in some cases, a Pocket PC) in the hands of the students, it is now practical to ask important open-ended questions where the required response is a *drawing*. This approach is very revealing, unlocking the underlying conceptual understanding (or mis-understanding) of your students. This real-time feedback can inform your next steps as an instructor, and your students don’t have to wait 3 days for their homework to be returned before they find out they don’t “get it” yet.

Examples I’ve seen from faculty include questions such as:

• Draw a free-body diagram that represents the forces and motion of this system (Engineering Dynamics, Physics…)
• Annotate this photograph (Geology, Art History….)
• Set up and solve this word problem (Mathematics…)
• Write some code that will… (Computer Science)

• DyKnow Vision (www.dyknow.com) – commercial, server-based software that records presentation annotations and private student annotations; supports participant collaboration/sharing, and can be replayed stroke by stroke
• Netsupport School (http://www.netsupportschool.com/) – commercial, software that networks classroom devices to the teacher’s device; supports sharing and viewing student screens
• Classroom Presenter (http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/dl/presenter/) – developed by Richard Anderson, University of Washington, in partnership with Microsoft; available free for non-commercial use; it projects annotated presentations, stroke by stroke, to student devices; students can submit responses for anonymous sharing by the instructor
• Ubiquitous Presenter (http://up.ucsd.edu/about/WhatIsUP.html) – developed by Beth Simon, University of California San Diego; similar to Classroom Presenter, but web server-based and supports non-tablet devices (text input); open source or faculty may set up a trial “course” for free on their server
  
  (To hear Professor Anderson and Professor Simon discuss their software, visit our HP Online Speaker Series archive, recorded and hosted by the University of Wisconsin at http://www.uwex.edu/ics/stream/uwc-rock/hp/)  

Have you tried any type of classroom response (clickers or graphical) in your classroom? What has been your experience?

I look forward to your comments...

Jim Vanides, M.Ed.
Program Manager - Worldwide Higher Education Philanthropy
Hewlett-Packard

For information about the HP Technology for Teaching philanthropy initiative in higher education, visit www.hp.com/go/hpteach-hied