Going interactive

Last year I gave a lecture to my students about the assignment they had to do. At the end I asked if anyone had any questions. Nobody raised a hand or spoke up. I knew that didn't mean they understood it all. And they clearly didn't; that became obvious when the assignments were submitted. I was a bit frustrated. How to inspire students to ask questions if they don't understand something? Or maybe I should take a step back: how to inspire students to realize they don't understand something? So this year I am going to try to stop them from sitting there with eyes glazed over, and mentally very far away. I am making it interactive.

During the PGCertHE induction, people from the Learning Technologies demonstrated a system that allows the audience to answer multiple choice questions you put in your presentation. (You can have them answer different kinds of questions too but I'll keep it MC.) I hope that'll keep them awake! And if it turns out they don't get the assignment, they're bound to notice that. I really hope it works! It took a while to get the necessary software installed, but once that was sorted the rest was mostly self-explanatory. The chap from Learning Technologies popped by to show me some features I may have overlooked. And then I had my first properly interactive lecture! I expect I will get a lot more reponse than when I just ask questions. This is anonymous; my experience is that students don't want to speak up. If they can just press a button without anyone knowing what they pressed, I suppose they might be less inhibited! Watch this space, I will report back...

The device used for givig answers