Clicker Survey Results for Spring 2009

As the semester has drawn to a close, I again asked students to repond to an Online Survey on their experience with “Clickers.”

Question #1: How has the professor’s use of the clicker ENHANCED your understanding of the course material?

• The professor and the clicker are both great! It is very useful. It made me read Dressler’s Understanding Criminal Law which otherwise I would not have done.
• I have found the questions have helped me to apply the theory of case law.
• I have found particularly helpful the questions my classmates have posed to Prof.
• The poll feature after the question is submitted is very helpful in figuring out the ideas and understanding of our classmates.
• It helped apply the principles to fact situations.
• I think it makes for pretty good discussion
• It has given the class, in my opinion, a good opportunity to put what we have learned to use & provided the professor the chance to offer feedback where we may have some confusion.

Question #2:  Can you suggest any improvements in the use of this technology during class?

• Having more time for discussion of the results would be good.
• The quizzes are very helpful. I would suggest that we have more time to spend in discussing answers and methods to use to properly address issues contained in the quizzes.
• It would have been fun to take more class polls with the clicker system or to use it throughout class for questions just so we could see if we were all on the same page. The system could prove to be pretty useful and valuable if it was utilized more.
• Maybe there can be questions posed throughout the lecture that are designed to test how well the students as a whole are grasping the material.
• Since it has been brought to the professor’s attention he has been requiring that all students hand in written answers (the alternative for using the clicker if a student forgets theirs or just wants to write in an answer) before discussion of the answers begins.  However  until this change was made  students would wait until the answer came up on the screen to hand in theirs  taking advantage of the system and leaving those students who took the time to prepare answers of their own  without that same benefit. 
• Make the “little blue man” more random and/or remove the ability to call on the same student twice in one class. I saw it twice that the same student had to go in the same class. In fact one person got “picked” twice in a row.

Upcoming CALI Conference

Keynote Speaker is John Palfrey, Professor of Law and Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, as well as a Faculty Co-Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Here are some interesting sessions that I hope to attend:

• “IT and Faculty as Partners in Education-Basic Tools For Change”
• Classroom Simulations and Technology Integration
• Multimedia applications: Creating Tools for Instruction and other Law School activities
• Ning: DIY – Building a Social Network from Scratch
• Creating in-house video tutorials to enhance campus training sessions
• Educational Technology Specialist – What Is It?
• Firefox Add-ons for Legal Research
• Videoconferencing Without Busting Your Budget
• Captioning media
• Information Overload
• Teaching with cloud and flash computing
• Flash-based Distribution of Skills Training Video
• Multimedia Tools for Law School
• Video Podcasting: Live from the desert!!
• Using New Media Tools for Recruitment: How we use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter
• Coursecrafting: (def.) Mashing up legal research, moot court, skills training and instructional technology into something new and innovative!

and more…

 

Google Moderator

Even the White House used Google Moderator to allow citizens to submit questions to President Obama for his town hall meeting on March 25, 2009.

Google Moderator lets you not only submit questions but vote on whether or not you like the questions that have already been submitted. In theory, this should sort out junk questions and present only the best questions for the town hall meeting.

There were 465,164 votes on 13,703 questions from 28,427 people!!

CALI presented a webinar on using this tool. (see post from May 6, 2009)

Professors go to: moderator.apps.com, sign in with their Google account, name the series and then email students this link.

Students then can submit questions and vote on whether or not they like the questions that have already been submitted.  This can be used  before review classes for exam in order to sort out what things professors need to review.

CALI Video on BlipTV