I taught my first full lesson on Thursday (that I did all the planning for)!
I think overall it went really well- I decided to use the CPS "clicker" system that's at Pioneer, and minus a few snafus I think it went well.
What I like about the program was this:
- The kids buzzed in anonymously, which is both good and bad. Good because it doesn't single them out as the people who got it wrong, bad because I'd like to know who was struggling with which questions. This can be alleviated though (see my next point)
- You can upload class lists (from PowerSchool) and it will assign each kid a clicker number. That way, you can do things like quizzes where you will see their scores, and it can fix my problem of not knowing who was struggling. It's still anonymous to the kids, but gives the teacher access to everything. And you don't have to grade quizzes :)
- It was REALLY FUN! The kids had a great time with the clickers. I overestimated their ability to just know how to use technology in the first class and they got a little confused, so in the 2nd class I walked through the clickers with them and it went a lot smoother. The kids asked if we could start using them more often, which made me feel really good!
The problems I had with the system were as follows:
- If you plan 2 separate sets of questions, as I did (test set and ACT set), you can't move from one set to the other without essentially exiting the program and starting it up again. I'm sure there is a way to do this, but I couldn't figure it out. Grr.
- When you plug in your computer to the projector, and everything gets all large (per usual), you can no longer see the bottom of the question set screen, so you (a) can't see any of the clicker numbers over 15 and (b) can't close out of the question set without unplugging, because the quit/close button is at the bottom of the screen. Which means when I had to exit the program and switch question sets, I also had to unplug and replug the projector. Grr again.
- When you are using the question set, you have to manually start and stop the session for kids to answer. A few times I forgot to press start so the kids had to re-buzz in their answers. I figured out that you can set it to automatically start the set, which was nice, but when I ran short on time and wanted to get to the last few wrap-up questions, it took a lot longer because I had to wait for each question to start, end it, and then move to the next question.
Like I said, overall I think the lesson went well. The clickers were a great way to take material that's pretty dry (ACT info), and make it fun and interesting for the kids. If anyone is looking for an ACT English lesson, I'd be glad to share mine!
3 comments:
Alli, it's great that you gave the clicker system a try. What do you think the kids liked about using it? Who else is using the system around the building? Is there any chance that you can pick the brains of some more experienced users to help you resolve those annoying issues with which you had to contend?
Alternatively, I was speaking with Liz after class and she was telling me what a big difference twitter has made for her professional development. Do you know of twitter? It's a sort of chat system in which communications are limited to 140 characters. I joined it a few months ago, but haven't yet got past my initial (and somewhat superficial) criticism of twitter, which is that people make a lot of comments about how long the line is in the grocery store today, etc. Liz tells me that (my words, not hers) my biased pig-headedness has closed me off to a great tool for "on the spot" help. She said that you have to invest a little time into building a network of people to "follow" on twitter, but now she floats a question out there and usually gets useful and very prompt responses. Maybe it's something to check out over break...
Sounds like you had a great first lesson, but the technology woes sound familiar! Not a reason to never use the clickers, I just always need to remind myself that it will take longer than anticipated to work out some of the kinks with question sets that you were mentioning.
It's so funny how I tend to assume that if it's technology related, the kids will catch on immediately, which is often but not always the case.
Hope you had a great Thanksgiving break!
-L
If your mentor's computer is hooked up to the tv, you could save the file and put it on his/her computer and then project the questions that way (you just have to make the font really big--still annoying because if the question and/or answers are long you kind of have to scroll around so the kids can see all the options)....I don't really know which is worse haha, good luck though, I'm sure you'll figure it out.
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