What is it?
Student response systems (SRSs) enable instructors to primarily to ask questions of their audience, assign various activity types, and collect and track immediate or asynchronous/self-paced responses. In addition, responses may be anonymous to provide a safer space to answer questions, including honest answer to controversial questions. Various SRSs can have few or many features, ranging from only multiple and true/false questions, to an entire slide presentation suite offering interactive slides, open-ended questions, and word clouds.
Why is this useful?
Engaging a larger group of students in an argument, asking them all to form an opinion or provide ideas about solutions can be a daunting task. Student response systems can help faculty gauge how many students have grasped a concept both in real-time understanding as well as comprehension of previous assignments, engage students with controversial topics without shaming individuals, or help uncover misconceptions and start the process of unlearning.
How do I use it at Carleton?
Currently, Carleton Academic Technology is supporting three versions of student response systems:
- Kahoot!
Kahoot is an online, browser- and smartphone-based system that’s terrific for classroom polling, in situations where everyone has a smartphone and can see the front of the room. Kahoot accounts are free and easy to create. - Zoom Polling
Zoom Polling is a built-in feature in Zoom. In order to take advantage of this polling feature, faculty need to plan ahead, enable this function under ### and then set up a poll ahead of time to be started up during class. Students will see the poll appear on their screen, answer and later see the results displayed. Visit the Zoom page for examples of Zoom Polling. - Physical classroom clickers (i.e. iclickers)
Carleton has more than 100 iClickers, managed by Academic Technologies, that can be reserved for individual classes or for an entire term. If interested in reserving iClickers for your class, please submit an ITS Help Desk ticket.
In addition, faculty can also find free add-ons to Google Slides, use Google Forms for feedback, or use a Moodle Survey for asynchronous collection of information. Free limited versions of Mentimeter, slido, or Poll Everywhere may also be useful for certain learning situations.
Spring 2023 Pilot
Carleton will be trying a small number of SRSs as part of a pilot during the Spring 2023 term, including Kahoot!, iClicker Cloud, Poll Everywhere, and Plickers. If you wish to find out more information about the pilot, please contact either Wiebke Kuhn, or Don Vosburg.