Our chemistry teacher has broken ground by using "clickers" to gather student responses to review questions before a test. Lucky for her, her text book includes multiple choice assessments for every chapter in PowerPoint format!
Formative assessment is challenging, and this tool gives her immediate feedback in order to review only questions the class needs to review. It also lets her identify students who need more individual help.
We downloaded class lists from our SMS, and uploaded them as "participant groups" in the software from Turning Technologies. Then it is simple to display the powerpoint slideshow on the projector with the response system tool at the top. By starting and stopping the system for each question she builds the session data needed to generate reports about the class in general and individual students.
Our teacher used her new Eno board pen to work out the problem solutions and quickly delete the "ink" to move on to the next question. In the future she can save these solutions, move to blank boards for more room to work, etc. It takes practice before taking full advantage of all the available tools.
100% engagement, a fun atmosphere, quality review time, and data! What more could you ask for during a chapter review! Well done!
Jamie - We use a similar idea in our chem classes. We have "clicker questions" provided to us by some of the publishers in the form of Power Points. Each student has a clicker and use this to answer the question on the smartboard.Once they have their answer, every student (clicks A, B, C, D,etc) responds. Then we show the correct answer and the graph of responses to show the class not who, but how many answered wrong. For example, if most of the class answered wrong, I would stop and do another example to reinforce or reteach the concept. Not only is it 100% engagement, but the students love it! And we have time to stop and review/reteach as necessary or move quickly through the concepts they have already mastered. In addition, we upload the exact clicker questions to the topics page so that they can go home and review those same questions.
ReplyDeleteI wrote this about OUR chem class. :-)
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