Types of Activities used with Clicker

Types of Activities used with Student Response Systems

Teaching with  Student Response Systems/ Clickers  can take a number of directions. Teachers will want to match activities to course content, time constraints, learning objectives, and their own teaching styles.

Attendance:
Clickers can be used to take attendance directly or indirectly by determining which students used their clickers during class.

Summative Assessment:
Clickers can be used for graded activities, such as multiple-choice quizzes or even tests. CPS clickers allow for a "student-paced" mode in which students answer questions on a printed test at their own pace.

Formative Assessment:
Clickers can be used to pose questions to students and collect their answers for the purpose of providing real-time information about student learning to both the instructor and the students. Students can use this feedback to monitor their own learning, and instructors can use it to change how they manage students’ learning needs

Homework Collection:
CPS clickers allow students to record their answers to multiple-choice or free response homework questions outside of class and submit their answers via the clickers at the start of class.

Discussion Warm-Up:
Posing a question, giving students time to think about it and record their answers via clickers, and then displaying the results can be an effective way to warm a class up for a class-wide discussion. This approach gives all students time to think about and commit to an answer, setting the stage for greater discussion participation.

Contingent Teaching:
Since it can occasionally be challenging to determine what students understand and what they do not understand, clickers can be used to gauge that in real-time during class and modify one's lesson plan accordingly. If the clicker data show that students understand a given topic, then the instructor can move on to the next one. If not, then more time can be spent on the topic, perhaps involving more lecture, class discussion, or another clicker question.

Peer Instruction:
The teacher poses a question to his or her students. The students ponder the question silently and transmit their individual answers using the clickers. The teacher checks the histogram of student responses. If significant numbers of students choose the wrong answer, the teacher instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbor. After a few minutes of discussion, the students submit their answers again.

Repeated Questions:
In the peer instruction approach described above, students respond to a given question twice--once after thinking about their answer individually and again after discussing it with their neighbor. Some instructors ask the same question several times, with different activities in between rounds of voting designed to help students better answer the question.

Question-Driven Instruction:
This approach combines contingent teaching and peer instruction. Lesson plans consist entirely of clicker questions. Which questions are asked depends entirely on how students answer the questions. An instructor might come into class with a stack of clicker questions, with multiple questions on each topic. As students perform well on clicker questions, the instructor moves on to questions on new topics. As students perform poorly, the instructor asks further questions on the same topic.

"Choose Your Own Adventure" Classes:
In this technique, an instructor poses a problem along with several possible approaches to solving it--perhaps approaches suggested by students during class. The instructor has the students vote on which approach to pursue first, then explores that approach with the students.

Source: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/cft/resources/teaching_resources/technology/crs.htm#teaching at the Vanderbilt Center for teaching