Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Plickers Tutorial: Formative Assessment Tool”.
In this article, we’re gon na learn about a website called plickers comm, it’s kind of a funny name, but what plickers is is it’s a way for teachers to do formative assessment in a classroom that may not have the ideal technology that you might want so for Years teachers have used tools like student clickers to do formative assessment and the way these work is the teacher asks a question and then the students answer on these handheld devices called clickers and their answers are sent to the teacher. So these have been very popular over the years, but they can be very expensive and so more recently alternatives to expensive clickers have been turning up, for example, Socrative. This is one of my favorites. Another great example is Kahoot that can turn just about any technology gadget into a student clicker, there’s also a class. Kick that’s, got some similarities, there’s formative or go formative, there’s quizzes and there’s quiz allies.
Now these are just a few of my favorites, but there are many other online formative assessment tools out there that are really great, but the downside to all of them is that they require technology and what, if you don’t have iPads in the classroom or Chromebooks or A computer lab to go to and what, if your students don’t have their own technology well, in that case, clickers is definitely the tool that you would want to use and the P and plickers comes from paper and the rest of the word comes from clickers. So these are basically paper clickers and the way it works. Is you print out these different student paper response cards and I have a classroom set of 30 of these and notice that they’re numbered. So this is number 29 and this one is number 26, and so I print out these free paper student response cards and then the next step is, I go into plickers comm and I create a series of questions or even just one question. So then, all I need to do is open up clickers on my cell phone or my iPad or another kind of tablet, and I just select the class is going to be answering my questions and you can see. I’Ve got a library of questions and I can just open up the library of questions pick the question that I would like to ask my students. I is the teacher, get to see what the right answer is. So in this case it’s D and then I asked the students, okay, students.
How do you say orange in Spanish and if you pull up this question on the plickers website, the students can also see the possible answers up on the screen or you could just tell them the possible answers and then the students take their cards and they decide. Okay, do I think the answer is a B C or D and whatever they think the right answer is that’s what they should put at the top of their response card. So you can see if the student thinks the answer is B. He or she would leave it at B and then I, as the teacher, can then use my iPad or it works best with the cell phones to simply select scan now so I’ll tap scan now and then, as the students hold up their response cards, I just Move my iPad or cell phone around the room until it scans all of the student cards. Now you can see what it’s done. It’S scanned one student card and found their answer to be wrong, and so that’s the idea behind clickers is instead of everyone having to have a clicker or a cell phone or an iPad.
Only the teacher has to have the technology. The students can just have paper cards that are printed for free and that they can use to answer any question that the teacher poses now. In my example, I was using my iPad to scan and that does work, but it will work better with a cell phone camera and a cell phone, whether it be Android or Apple. So, let’s take a look at how to create clickers classes and clickers questions so that you can do what I just showed here at plickers comm. You need to first sign up for an account once you’ve done that from then on. You can just sign into your account.
Give me a second to do that. Okay, now that I’ve signed up or signed into my account, you can see that it takes me my plickers homepage, where I have a library. I have reports, classes and live view and plickers will try to kind of teach you how to use it. But that’s also why you’re watching this video, so I’m gon na close out of this and notice that it gave me a demo class that I can use to practice as I learn to use clickers. In my case, though, I want to add a new class, so I’ll click there I’ll give the class a name select a year select a subject and a class color. Then click Save, and it takes me to this page, that’s kind of confusing.
Basically what this is. It’S for creating a class roster, so that plickers knows which student is answering the questions that you posed now to add students to this class roster. I can do that a couple of ways I could click add roster and let’s say I have a class roster in a grading tool that I use or a learning management system and LMS or somewhere else. I could just copy that roster and then paste it in here notice that each name has to be on a new line, and it should be last name, comma, first name. So that’s one way to add students into your class rosters. Another way is the old-fashioned way.
I can just go in and type in, the student’s name hit enter and it adds the student to my class roster. So I can go in and I can type in each person, one at a time to add them into my class notice that as they’re added to the class, the available cards change. So it’s assigning card number one to Tim, Howard here and it’s assigning Betsy Ross to card number five, and this is important to always make note of what student gets, which card, because remember the paper cards that you’re gon na print out are numbered.
I need to make sure Adam Smith always gets card number two, and that Thomas Jefferson here always gets card number three and Martha Washington card number four. If they don’t always use that card, it’s gon na throw off the results. Okay, so you can see it’s pretty easy to create a class roster once you’ve done that next, you need to go to your library, so I’ll click on library and you need to create a question or two for your students to be able to answer so I’ll. Just click on new question and my question is gon na be what is that capital city of chile, the country of Chile? I need to decide if I want to add an image. If I do, I just click and then browse my computer for an image that I would like to upload.
If I don’t want a picture, I decide. Is this a multiple choice, question or a true/false question I’ll go with multiple choice, put in a couple possible answers and once I’ve done that I must mark which is the correct answer and then click Save and I’m done making that question. If you’re gon na make a series of questions, of course you can click Save and create new, and it opens up a second question for you to ask so give me a few seconds, as I create a couple more questions for my plickers class, so I’ve created Three different questions, and I would like to be able to ask my students these questions and see how they do in order to assess what they’ve learned so far and what they need to work on to improve. All I need to do is again make sure I’m signed in to plickers comm and click live view.
I have this on the board. If you have a projector or a smart board, make sure that this is showing on the screen so that the students can see it and once it’s on the screen, when you’re ready just take out your cell phone, or in this case it’s my iPad, select the Class that you would like to use the activity with so in this case Spanish one. Next, I need to tap on library to show my questions that I’ve created and I’d like to start with the middle one. What is the capital of Mexico? So I just tap that now notice that on the screen at the front of the room on the smart board, whatever it might be, my question isn’t showing up there.
The reason why is because I haven’t tapped this button, yet that says scan now, so I’ll go ahead and tap that and now, if you look on my computer, which hopefully is showing on a smart board or on a screen at the front of the room, there Is the question so the students can look up, see the question and they can see the possible answers and then make their decisions. So Adam Smith, for example, thinks that the answer is a and I, as the teacher, just move my cell phone around the room to get all of the cards to capture all of the cards and in this case, there’s just the one card. But it picked up. The fact that Adam Smith got the right answer, a Mexico City, so now going back to the computer screen, these results have been captured and I will be able to go back and look at this later. If I would like to notice, I can also get a graph that shows how many got answer a how many got answer, B, C and D, and so this will really help me as the teacher to do some formative evaluation, some formative assessment. I can look at my students and see okay, they’re, really strong in this question or they’re really weak in this question. Maybe we need to practice it review. It go back and study it again and you can also pick out specific students and which ones are struggling and which ones are not okay.
Now, if I wanted to move on and ask another question of my students, it’s easy – I just use my cell phone or in this case it’s an iPad. So I just need to tap this checkmark and it shows me the percentage correct that this class got and who got the right answers and who got the wrong answers. And then I can just tap here in the upper left to go back to my class screen. Tap library – and I can ask my second question or my third question, whatever question – I want to ask next as soon as I tap scan now my computer, that’s showing on the smart board or screen at the front of the room changes and it shows the new Question – and we just repeat until we’re done so you can see plickers – are a really unique kind of creative way of pulling information from a large group of people and being able to assess a large group of people very easily. So it’s perfect for formative assessment in the classroom, especially when your students, maybe don’t have their own technology, and maybe you don’t have a computer lab that you can go to or that you can use very often in class. Now there are a few more things about clickers that I hope that you’ll learn on your own.
I would encourage you to explore and see what else you can do with clickers. For example, you could learn more about the question queue and you can do that just by going to the help to learn more about it. You should also take a look at reports. Reports are a way to see what has happened in the so, let’s say a week from now or a month from now or a year from now. I could go into this report and I could click on it and it would give me a list here of the results, each student and the answers that they gave. So I hope that you enjoy using clickers – and I hope, you’re also looking forward to learning about some of these other tools that you can use to do: online formative assessment tools like Socrative, Kahoot, classkick, goformative, quizzes and quiz allies. Please subscribe to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students. .