Click Click Click Click...

Today was a Tuesday filled with CPS response pads and the accompanying software from eInstruction.

Earlier this year, our district purchased CPS classroom sets of the CPS Pulse for every building, and now that coaches and many tech assistants have attended a training, the word is out about the excellent potential for classroom use to teach lessons, quiz students, gather student performance data, and engage in instant formative assessment.

Like many other districts, we've taken to calling these devices "clickers," but it's really a misnomer. They don't make any clicking sound! The buttons are made of rubber and the response pads are actually quite silent in operation.

The noise in our district seems to be teachers and administrators clamoring to get their hands -- or their students' hands -- on the devices ASAP. And why not? CPS keeps students interested and engaged in class, allowing even the most reserved students to actively participate and interact with lessons, "answering every question with confidence," as the eInstruction site states.

My day began with trips to two elementary schools to work with individual teachers who were getting started with the response pads. It continued with the scheduling of a co-taught lesson for next week with a teacher who has been working with me over the past few weeks to create lessons and quizes in the ExamView software. Next came the word that the AICs could offer two flex sessions in the upcoming month for teachers who want to learn how to use the software and "clickers." After communicating with Principals at three other elementary schools, we began planning an agenda for a morning faculty meeting presentation and two day-long drop-in-style trainings on site for teachers who would like to get trained during their lunch, prep, or special periods.

I don't need to write too much about everything CPS can do. Millions of students are using them, the data they can generate can be as robust or simple as the individual instructors choose, and the eInstruction website does an excellent job of covering the attributes, specs, and instructions for use. What I do see is the great potential these can have on student learning when used well, and the negative potential for being just another device used "for technology's sake" if we don't consider a few things.

1) A postive: it is very easy for teachers to hand out their paper-based assessments to students and have them take the existing test or quiz using the clickers. A negative: it is very easy for teachers to hand out their paper-based assessments to students and have them take the existing test or quiz using the clickers!

2) A great positive: teachers can get instant reports on the topics, questions and skills in which their students excell or lag behind. A potential drawback: standardized tests are not flawless, and we can't always create flawless tests ourselves. We are already in an public school environment that is so heavily based on testing data that real instructional time, or class time to develop the higher order thinking skills in New Bloom's Taxonomy, is already scare and at a premium. If our use of the response pads in class is as popular as I believe it will be, how we choose to use this tool could put us at a crossroads between developing real 21st century skills, and just piling on to the existing dross with more empty assessments.

3) Wow: all students can answer at once, or students can go at their own pace following a lesson created in the software, displayed in another electronic presentation, or given to them on paper. And teachers can review the data this generates in a variety of different forms, mining several criteria (name, age, gender, economic status, skill, topic, standard, etc.) collected in one lesson or over time. All of this is relatively easy to set up and use, and students really enjoy it! Now: let's make sure we don't all fall in line with "death by 4-stem multiple choice" questions! In addition to multiple choice, multiple answers, yes-no, ranking, and true-false questions, the clickers allow students to enter text responses (no QWERTY keypad or T9, and I'm sorry to say that Droid or iPhone users will feel like they just fell back to their 2002 phones, but students CAN text their answers in complete sentences). Teachers can vary the type of questions and answers... but can we ask the right questions?

Imagine posting just one question at the start of class, asking students to rate their level of understanding with the material, and having them check in periodically to gauge their progress. (Thanks, Jason, for this idea!) Teachers would be provided with visual, numeric, or percentage-based statistics that tell them when their students need some extra time, when something needs to be re-taught, and when they are ready to move forward.

What if students or student groups created some of the assessments and simultaneously showed what they know and what they value about a topic?

What if students entered text to backchannel throughout a lecture?

Please use these great tools for your students' benefit, but please think outside the box (well, it's really more of a zippered cloth case) in doing so.

An AIC will be here to help whenever you're ready!
:)