Clickers Response

Clickers work extremely well in class when incorporated properly. The ability for something so simple to increase attendance, increase grade scores, increase student retention, and allow for an instructor to have a better understanding of where the class is at should always be implemented. However, I do have one concern with clickers.

I hate multiple choice questions. My experience has been that they are not testing whether the correct answer is known, rather that the incorrect ones can be identified. In my opinion, that is one limitation to the clickers. I posted for Jeff about using an iPad or something of the sorts as a clicker replacement. If a program could be written that recognizes certain key feature to problems, I think that would be even more useful. Have something that would identify a picture being drawn and certain equations being used. This would allow for the instructor to see what approaches students are applying to problems and where they begin tailing off in the wrong direction. This would require the students to show their work on the whatever it is  that is responding and then discussing. Maybe certain peoples' work could be projected also so that the method they chose can be analyzed.

This is almost like a hybrid of using clickers and what Dr. Christensen did when I watched his class. He would have the students working on problems and would constantly take someone's work and post it for all to see. This would contain that with the file but also evaluate what steps students did and what answer they obtain in the end.

Technology in the Classroom

The main thing I learned through this presentation is that even in my ideal teaching classroom, I was still so short of all the uses of technology that I could use. A discussion board and online information is not the extent, rather it seems like the bare minimum. I'm really not sure what else to say other than that it will take a lot of investigating to really determine what is the best way to implement technology, what technology to implement, and how it will guide the students to the objectives for the course.

Technology

I was just curious if there was anything outside of clicker questions that could be used to assess what students are thinking on problems. I remember Dr. Boyer, I believe, use in Journal club an online assessment sort of thing where people would answer and it would post on a website. I like something like that, but maybe even more advanced.

Ideally, I'm imagining a class where everyone has an iPad (both Shannon and Erika's dream) and there is some sort of a program where people would do work on their iPad. There would be different sections for writing down certain things, like constants or final answer, I'm not sure. But the program would recognize the writing and determine how the student did based on how the professor (assuming an expert) solved it. There could then be some sort of an analysis of the class results and what happened with the work. I guess what I'm asking, is if there is anything like this or how difficult it would be to attain this.