When they first arrived on campus, my ‘clickers’ stayed in the box for four months. It is a fact of which I am not proud, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I feel it is important to state that outright as a counterpoint to my current view on interactive whiteboard response systems. I had been given the response system almost as an afterthought: they arrived approximately 8 weeks into the school year with no prior notice, no training, not even a driver CD, as the driver was in the suite of network programs. I do not consider myself either particularly risk-averse or particularly slow to adapt to new technology; however, this just seemed so unimportant to my district, I couldn’t seem to drum up the wherewithal to start from scratch. Even after my curiosity overwhelmed me and I pulled them out for the first time, I would definitely have qualified as an “infrequent user”, a teacher who not only uses the technology rarely, but focuses on only a narrow range of its potential uses; that of summative evaluation. (Penuel, Crawford, DeBarger, Boscardin, Masyn, & Urdan, 2005). It was only after a reading from a previous course that I considered how many other options were available to me.
Around that same time, I was enrolled in a district professional development for use of the response system remotes. I came away with more technical knowledge of the system and the accompanying software and even more frustration about how to make the system an authentic part of instruction as opposed to a bit of Vegas-style fluff whose central purpose was to get students’ attention. (University of Minnesota Office of Classroom Management, 2009) So, as many of us do, I began to dig. I looked on the online lesson exchange that supports our district resources (SMART Technologies), I floated around discussion forums, and I spent real time with the software. Over the course of the following weeks, I came back to an important truth known by researchers and teachers alike: professional development in how to integrate technology into instruction has broad power in committing teachers to regular use of that resource. (Penuel, Crawford, DeBarger, Boscardin, Masyn, & Urdan, 2005) In other words, convince a teacher that students are the better for it, and they will use the remotes. In March and April I had an opportunity to implement some training on my home campus that stems from this truth. Between the first session and the second, eight new teachers brought their teaching and their ‘clickers’ out of the box. Eight might seem a small number, but to me, it is the start of a revolution.
References:
Penuel, W., Crawford, V., DeBarger, A., Boscardin, C., Masyn, K., & Urdan, T. (2005). Teaching with student response system technology: A survey of k-12 teachers. Retrieved 5 2011, May, from SRI International: http://ctl.sri.com/publications/downloads/Teaching_with_Audience_Response_Systems_Brief_Report.pdf
University of Minnesota Office of Classroom Management. (2009, March 25). Student response systems overview. Retrieved May 5, 2011, from University of Minnesota: http://www.classroom.umn.edu/support/support-srs.html
