clickers

In the internship that I am doing right now, we have these weekly seminars on Mondays. Every week, a different group is instructed to lead the class discussion. We can pick any topic that we want to. Usually, groups pick topics that relate to secondary education in some manner. Last week, my group decided to change this up a bit. We decided to lead a discussion on clickers.

We weren't really sure how this would go with everyone. It turned out that the discussion that we had that week was one of the best ones. This was mainly because people were so opinionated about clickers so we were not short of material. I used clickers in a lot of my classes and was relatively indifferent to them. But some of the students in my class went off about how they hate them. It was really surprising to me.

The main complaint that people gave when it came to clickers was the fact that it was kind of forcing students to learn. Clickers motivate people to go to class and answer questions mainly because the teacher uses them to grade you. A few students argued that this kind of takes away from the college atmosphere; college is supposed to be a student motivated process where the student is mature enough to want to learn the material. Clickers somewhat take that away. Additionally, there is the occasional practice of taking someone elses clicker to class. That definitely pisses some people off. All in all, we came to the conclusion that students in general don't like clickers even though some professors may argue that they "stimulate classroom participation and encourage student collaboration." Most people agree that that was just a lot of bs.