Polling Devices, Clicker Buttons,

PRSs (Personal Response Systems)
TBA (Late June, 2005)

Details are not yet available about this LT3 event about "clickers" except to say a presentation by UW professors will be held during the last week of June.

For background reading, visit

Teaching with the Personal Response System to Enhance Lectures and Engage Students

      Speaker: Richard Rogers, Faculty Advisor to the Provost for
      Undergraduate Education and Professor of Resource Economics, University
      of Massachusetts Amherst
  
      Professor Rogers has been teaching with PRS in his Intro Stats courses
      for the past seven years where his enrollments have grown beyond 300
      students per course. His course data show that PRS can improve overall
      average student satisfaction, participation, performance, and
      attendance; although he emphasizes that PRS should not be used to take
      attendance but to increase attendance and decrease passive attendance
      by improving lectures. The key remains the quality of the lectures and
      thus the quality of the PRS questions you ask is paramount. He also
      reminds us that there are no magic bullets as PRS cannot turn a poor
      class into a good class and no single teaching tool appeals to all
      students. The use of PRS adds costs to the students, to the instructor
      in added administrative tasks, and to the institution, but he finds it
      has allowed him to enhance active learning, better engage his students,
      and adjust his lectures on the fly even in very large lecture
      settings.

Find 50 pages of calculus questions of the GoodQuestions project (Cornell) on the page "Learning and teaching with online systems" in the "Lessons" folder at

Doug Duncan's book Clickers in the Classroom 2005, is also enthusiastic. The first two chapters are online.

      Professor Ducan is Director of Astronomical Laboratories (including
      Fiske Planetarium and the Sommers Bausch Observatory) of the Department
      of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences of the University of Colorado,
      and previously served as National Education Coordinator of the American
      Astronomical Society and as a commentator on National Public Radio.