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Monday, November 15, 2010

NYTimes article on hand held devices in classrooms.

Hand Held Devices Find a Place in College Classrooms

An interesting read for two reasons... While this article talks about using clicker devices made specifically for the classroom, it mentions that this can be done on the iphone/ipad. eclicker is one implementation. I didn't download this since it's $10 for the host software (it would be free for the student-side software) and I don't have students with ipads to test this out on, but interesting nonetheless.

Second reason I found this interesting is that it seems like some colleges are finally catching up with K-12 education in seeing the benefit of students being actively engaged in class (versus passively listening to a lecture). I know Arizona State has been doing this in their intro astronomy classes for years (I took a 4-day course for astronomy teachers a number of years back taught by ASU profs who did "group work" in a 150/200 student lecture class. While we don't have the challenge of teaching classes with 100 students, I could see this still having benefits for quick formative assessments and as a way to get quiet students actively participating (along with the game show novelty that shouldn't be underestimated).

Avery

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