Category: educational technology

Raising hands, students have no way to signal intensity of preference to participate. For example, a student might feel that a given comment is quite important, perhaps the highest-quality contribution the student will have in that course all semester. But raising hands introduces an important element of chance — who the instructor happens to call on.

The Call Tool proposes a different approach. By choosing from four levels of intensity, A through D, students can signal the urgency of their contribution. D’s are more likely to be called, but are correspondingly more dear — perhaps just 1 to 3 D calls permitted per student across an entire semester in a given course.

The Call Tool also includes optional calculations to favor students who have not spoken recently. For unpredictability, the tool can incorporate several types of randomness as well as random calls (selecting from all students with equal probability) and cold calls (limited to students not at that moment requesting to participate). The factors used to prioritize students are customizable by instructors, both in weights and in functional form (the mathematical relationship from input to output).

To learn which student has been chosen to speak next, an instructor can look at a screen (classroom touch panel, an instructor-provided laptop or Windows tablet, or confidence monitor), or listen to names in a wireless earpiece. The tool can be controlled from two buttons on a standard wireless remote control. On-screen display helps the instructor quickly find the chosen student via a large-font display of student name, an arrow towards seating location, and a map of seating location.

Sight-impaired instructors can use the Call Tool to learn students’ interests in participating, and select and call students, even if they have difficulty seeing students and raised hands. With wireless earpiece and wireless remote control, an instructor need not look at any computer screen to use the tool during class.

The Call Tool automatically saves all results (including calls and student requests to participate) to a file for subsequent instructor analysis.

Often a class discussion changes students’ opinions or plans of action. For example, a student might enter class favoring one approach, but discussion might sway the student to another approach. A multi-round poll can highlight these changes for targeted calls. A representative scenario: At the start of class, an instructor might ask which students favor approach A versus B, with students submitting their choices via polling buttons. After 50 minutes of discussion, the instructor could ask the same question again. With this tool, the instructor can easily see which students changed their answers.

Tool features:

• Shows students’ names (not just seating locations) for quick interpretation and correct & confident calls.
• Highlights students with changed responses via color-coding in the list of students, and via a seatmap with colors showing prior and current responses.
• Accommodates arbitrarily many rounds — two rounds, but also three, ten, etc. as useful.
• Instantly tabulates and presents all changes — how many students changed from A to B, how many A to C, etc. for every combination of options.
• Automatically saves all results to a file for subsequent instructor analysis.

My tool Real-Time On-Screen “Chalkboard” Class Notes helps instructors use modern software and projectors rather than chalk — for readability, speed, and flexibility, among other benefits.

The Real-Time Polling System is allows students and other meeting participants to express comments immediately viewed by the instructor or, optionally, the entire class. In one application, the system might present a slider with extremes labeled “I am confused” and “I understand”; when sufficiently many students move their sliders sufficiently towards the “confused” end of the spectrum, the instructor might be automatically alerted to pause for review or questions from students. The system can also be configured with buttons, checkboxes, drop-down lists, and free-response text boxes, and it can perform crosstab analysis, automatically reporting results split according to relevant demographic or other characteristics. Results are ordinarily displayed on a projection screen at the front of the room and/or on administrative consoles. Textual responses are integrated with the Participant Response Display Mechanism.

Details in Berkman Center Meeting Tools.

Some questions are best asked in writing for a more direct, on-the-record, reponse and to facilitate more pointed debate. To combine these benefits of textual responses with the immediacy of a face-to-face event, I developed the “Participant Response Display Mechanism” which receives brief messages from two or more computer terminals for display on a projection screen. As each participant responds, his answer is immediately displayed for others to see, and the system avoids bias towards fast typists by giving each participant a separate area on the screen. In other configurations, messages may be queued for manual review by an instructor or assistant, may be routed to the screen in their entirety, or may be selected randomly. With flexibility in the configuration of screen areas, this system can be used to facilitate a textual “debate” (whether genuine or role-play), and with queuing systems to share space among a larger group, the system can facilitate a written meta-discussion among all participants even as primary discussion continues orally.

This system was used at the ICANN Candidate Forum in Cambridge, MA in October 2000.

Details in Berkman Center Meeting Tools.

My Webcast and Remote Comment Submission System allowed participants in a webcast to ask questions of the group that assembled in person. This system was used in a variety of contexts in the first twelve quarterly public meetings of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). This method proved especially useful to some non-native English speakers, who reported finding written remarks more natural and less intimidating.  It also allowed synchronous discussion to address more questions in less time, and it facilitated screening questions for relevance to the topic at hand.

Details in Berkman Center Meeting Tools.