Audience Response Systems make the New York Times Education Section

A report in the New York Times Education section today, a link contributed by one of our faculty members, discusses on audience response systems (ARS) use in the classroom, focusing on physics instruction in AP course. (See more below)

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Education

Students Click, and a Quiz Becomes a Game

By WINNIE HU

Published: January 28, 2008

A technology known as an audience response system is spreading to public and private schools across the country.
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Audience Response Systems Focus Group

The Educational Technologies group in Information Technology (IT) has received an increasing number of requests for audience response systems in Rice classrooms. Audience Response Systems interface with instructional computers allowing faculty members to query, collect, and display student responses to the attending class via hand held devices. Two classrooms currently have the software and the clickers that turn PowerPoint presentations into interactive classroom discussions.

IT is hosting several focus groups during the last week of February to gauge additional interest.

In these focus groups, EdTech staff will demonstrate several vendors' products (yes, you can hold a clicker and participate in the demo!) and we will ask participants to estimate if and when they would be ready to use the applications in their Rice courses.

If you would like to participate in one of the focus groups, please email carlyn@rice.edu to learn the dates and times for the focus groups.

Your Turn! Meeting with Rice Faculty

As part of the "Teaching with Technology Brown Bag" series, members of the Educational Technologies and the Digital Media Center from Rice's Fondren Library met with faculty, staff and students to discuss and listen to instructional needs. Meeting points were collected on a 'digital board' using the Tufts University free Vue Program and are synthesized in the diagram below.

Issues brought up in conversation included:
- Audience Response Systems. There are currently two systems installed on the Rice campus but with the increased interest a focus group meeting will be announced shortly to start discussions leading to a campus wide deployment.
- The desire to record lectures to post to OWL-Space sites. This capability is currently available in some of our podiums and with the addition of the podcasting tool in OWL-Space, the pieces are in place. Please contact the EdTech department for individualized help in this area.
- Integration of Library Services and Connexions into OWL-Space. The EdTech group is looking into these tools. The attendees also requested the availability of reserve texts in OWL-Space.
- Some faculty members requested collaboration with the library to instruct students on proper research methodologies in the 'Google Era'. Fondren Library and the Digital Media Center is ready to assist in this area.

Other areas of interest included:
- Ability to pull and digitally annotate texts on the spot
- Electronic whiteboards to capture classroom generated content
- High quality capture of video presentations
- Calibrated peer review systems
- Access to Rice owned and shared image banks
- Document check-out features in OWL-Space
- Integration of OWL-Space into outreach programs