Clickers vs cards

I use peer instruction in most of my introductory courses.  When I first started I used colored cards for the students to use when answering multiple choice concept questions but when I had a chance to switch to clickers (personal response systems) I jumped at it.  I was the first person on campus to use them so I was sort of on my own with the hardware and software.  I lugged around the receivers and passed out the clickers on the first day of class, claiming that I'd charge the students $30 if they didn't turn them in.

I did that for around 4 or 5 years until one summer I realized how unexcited I was for a new class that was starting.  I tried to pin down my own emotions and realized that it was the lugging of the receivers and also having to always hook up my laptop at the beginning of the class.  So, just because I was lazy, I went back to colored cards.  I haven't switched back since and I thought I'd write a little about why.


First, why they compare so well for me.
I only ever used the clickers to collect and display answers for multiple choice questions.  I never tracked individual students (though I could have) and I never used the clickers to collect graded assignments like quizzes.  Since that's all I ever did, it's clear that colored cards don't have an immediate disadvantage.


Where you'd think clickers would win:
There are a few arguments in the pedagogy literature that talk about why student learning improves with clickers that wouldn't seem to work as well with cards.  The first is anonymity.  The students are unable to tell what their neighbors have voted on and this provides students cover to really think about what they're doing and not be intimidated by who they think the smart students are.  Scholars have also written about how students enjoy using clickers in class.  It keeps them engaged and it's fun to play with toys.  One more argument for clickers is that the students can see the histogram of the class vote projected.  This allows them to see that not all have said the same thing but that there are one or two answers where a lot of them have fallen.  This then tends to aid in the "convince your neighbors" portion of the peer instruction pedagogy.  There are more arguments for clickers but I'll just stick with those three for this post.

How do the cards stack up?
 First anonymity.  With cards students can watch what others do and be influenced.  I use cards that are only colored on one side so that at least the classmates behind you can't see what you're voting for.  In my experience I haven't seen a lot of influence happening in the first vote though I would say they use the cards to visually communicate with each other across the room during the "convince your neighbors" portion.  This is probably a win for clickers but not a huge win.

Next, the fun factor.
My students tend to have fun with the cards and appreciate the fact that they always work.  If they forget them they find interesting ways to vote like pointing at articles of clothing of the appropriate color.  Of course, sometimes I embarrass them in an effort to get them to bring them in the future by asking the students to stand and shout their vote instead.  The students have fun with cards primarily through my confidence level approach (see below).

Finally the histrogram: 
 When my student vote my eyes very quickly discern the color that is winning and I communicate that to them orally.  I feel, at least, that I'm able to provide them nearly as much detail about the distribution by simply describing it as they'd get by seeing it.  I admit I don't have much data to back that up, of course, but I will say I haven't heard complaints about it.


Where cards win:
It's very easy, of course, to administer the card approach.  I cut the cards, laminate them, and hand them out on the first day of class.  The cost is pretty low so if I don't get them back it's not a big deal.  There's no receiver to adjust, no software to play with, and no batteries to change or make available.  Laminating them makes them last for quite a while (3 years so far with no losses yet!).

Confidence level
The biggest unexpected benefit I've found with the cards is how the students can communicate their confidence level on a vote.  With clickers (at least the PRS ones I have) there are modifier buttons for the students to choose low, medium, or high confidence when voting and that is color coded in the histogram. With the cards I simply tell the students that their confidence level is the height they hold their cards above their head.  My students have a lot of fun with this.  Some have been known to stand on their desks and reach the ceiling with their cards while others will slouch and nearly drop their card to the ground.  I find this analog scale of confidence to be very useful to me as the instructor.  I often pay more attention to the confidence displayed than to the votes themselves.

Loss of anonymity
What's most interesting to me is that the confidence level is clearly not anonymous.  This creates a very interesting classroom dynamic as students can see that there is some confidence in the class in some cases and in others they can feel consoled by the lack of confidence anywhere.  I feel that this mix of anonymity (present, at least to some degree, with the vote itself while absent for the confidence level) is really useful in the classroom.  I especially like when there are more than one super confident students who don't agree with each other.  The class seems to get excited about the battle that shapes up with those "captains".


Final thoughts
In head to head comparisons looking at learning outcomes, cards and clickers are neck and neck. There are advocates on both sides (you can see where I stand) and I would encourage people to really think about which features they're looking for.  The confidence level aspect that I discuss here is something that I've only recently really put some thought into, especially the split anonymity, but I'd love to hear some differing opinions.

Jarnal (vs the Gimp) for screencasting

I've been putting more thought and research into better ways to do my screencasts/lecture capture and I've stumbled onto Jarnal.  It's a straight-forward whiteboard editor but it comes with some handy extra features (see below).  For screencasting it's biggest downside is that it doesn't have a pressure-sensitive option for the pen tablet I'm using and at first I thought that would be a deal breaker.  The reason is that with the whiteboard feature in Elluminate I always thought my handwriting looked awful, especially compared with how it looks when I use the Gimp to capture my writing.  Here's a comparison of a simple equation done in Jarnal and the Gimp:

Notice how the Gimp is lighter but also crisper.  The strokes look just like my handwriting on paper while the Jarnal one looks darker and blockier.  That's due to the lack of pressure sensitivity.  Now, of course the main point is that they are both legible!  So, even though I think it looks uglier after using it for a while, the other features that Jarnal bring to the table have convinced me to go with it for screencapturing in my courses this coming spring.

The first feature I really like (compared to the Gimp) is the ease to add extra pages as I need them.  In Jarnal it's a simple mouse click; in the Gimp it's a whole bunch of mouse clicks that generates effectively a different file.  With the Jarnal approach I can make a single document and upload it along with any screencast I make.  In the past I could do that in principle (and in fact I did on rare occasions) but it always was a little bit of a hassle to save, keep, and upload all the files.  Jarnal exports a single pdf file that I can easily share with my students.

Jarnal also greatly reduces the tool choices from the mammoth set that comes with the Gimp (remember, that was designed for photo editing).  I really like the simple pen and highlighter choices and the small list of color choices fits me just fine.  It's also easy to draw straight lines and to paste in photos (both of which can be done in the Gimp but it takes more mouse clicks).

Jarnal's big selling point is that it's great for annotating PDFs.  I have started to use this feature when commenting on student papers.  You can mark right on them just like you would with your red pen.  Also, it's really easy to add in extra pages, which I've done both for adding in a quick drawing to get my point across, and for adding in the rubric pdf page along with my scoring of the paper.

Teaching Naked

It appears I didn't try enough different search terms a year ago to look into resources for my new way of teaching.  I stumbled on this July article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed thanks to a tip from my buddy Jim Bonilla.  He and I were in a meeting to address technology in teaching and after I shared how I taught Modern Physics last semester (and plan to teach two courses this coming spring) he mentioned the concept of "Teaching Naked".  The article he pointed me to was published back in 2006 and is a great read along with the Chronicle article (and video!).

It seems that Professor (Dean) Bowen has worked with former colleagues at the University of Miami of Ohio on the concept of using class time to enhance the educational experience rather than to provide content.  He's a music professor (which might explain how I didn't find him last year --- "screencast physics" was a common search term for me) and he gives lots of examples of how he's changed his teaching style to move in this direction.  One of the things that he talks about that resonates well with me is the comparison with fully online teaching.  There both content and interaction have to be done outside of the classroom but in "Teaching Naked" you provide content outside of the class and then, usually, run discussions in class.

One of the disappointing things about finding this is the negative response in the Chronicle comments.  It reminds me of some of the conversations I've had with my own colleagues.  But, on the bright side, it's great to find someone with such a similar philosophy to mine and who has been successful implementing it.

I'm now the proud owner of a Screencast.com Pro account.  Here's one way I use it:

Screencasting in Sound and Music

Next semester I'm teaching PHYS 1140 Physics of Sound and Music which is a course for non-science majors.  I plan to use the same organizational structure that I did in last year's Modern Physics course.  I'm a little nervous about being able to motivate the students to put in the time outside of class but I really think it'll pay off for them (and me) if I can make the class time useful for all of us.  I have two ideas for that.

First I'm going to try to do a demo in every class.  That's going to take some planning but luckily I have all of j-term free (with the exception of chairing the tenure and promotion committee) to do that so I think there's a chance I can pull it off.  Since the screencasts and the book will be taking care of the material I think it'll be fun to start each class (after the quiz, of course) with a demo and then have the students talk about the physics it represents.  I'm sure there will be some days when I'll be lazy and use a computer simulation instead but even those can be pedagogically useful (in fact I've recently read an article that makes the case that the cleaner simulations do a better job of teaching but that's another blog post).

Second I'm going to try to emulate Google's Moderator software with the questions students post.  That way the class can "crowdsource" the questions and rank the best ones.  That way it'll be ok if I don't get to every question from every student.  I've got some work ahead of me to pull that off but I've done something similar in the past so hopefully I can get it done in time.

leaf evidence

leaf update

It appears that one lawn bag holds between 40,000 and 50,000 leaves. The boys have renegotiated for $1/bag from now on. They're not dumb, those two. here's the description of the project