Plickers in the classroom

Students’ shyness can be a challenge for the teacher to monitor who needs support. With a classroom clicker activity, you can encourage participation and activate students’ learning.

Summary

 Classroom clickers were initially developed as means to keep students cognitively active during lessons. However, they are also a great tool for formative assessment. Ana Maria uses Plickers, a digital tool that does not require students to have their own device. Only the teacher needs a computer and a tablet/smartphone to scan codes that are found on answer cards. Instead of raising hands, students raise these cards to answer. They can see the questions and results real-time on the classroom projector and compete with each other. In turn, the teacher can see which topics are the most challenging and need to be addressed further, and also monitor students that are experiencing difficulties and provide them with feedback to improve and additional exercises to practice.

 

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Keywords

Classroom polling, online quiz, inclusiveness

Quick reference
Objectives
Encourage every student to participate in classroom exercises and obtain quick data on the most challenging questions and students that need further support
Country
Spain
Prerequisites
Teacher account on Plickers and Plickers app
Implementation level
Easy
Target group age
Primary and secondary school
Digital tools
DFA tool
Classroom polling
Duration
1 session or shorter

Context

Classroom clickers are tools that emerged in the 90’s to make students more active during lessons. The teacher presents a question and students submit their answers by using a special device with different buttons for each type of answer on a multiple-choice question or a poll (e.g. Yes/No). This type of polling activity has now evolved into online quiz tools as students can now use tablets or smartphones to answer. But what if students do not have access to such devices, or if the school has a policy against bringing one’s own device?

Teachers might think that digital formative assessment requires a good infrastructure and that students need to have access to a digital device. But DFA comprises a wide range of practices that can be done without much technology. 

Ana María Lourido Novas from the school IES Johan Carballeira – Bueu, does not need her students to have their own devices. “Plickers is a tool, allowing students to be assessed in a dynamic, playful environment, with minimal technical means” she says. To use the tool, teachers need a computer, a projector, printed sheets, a smartphone, or tablet with the app installed, and an Internet connection, which does not need to be particularly fast. Ana Maria uses this in her French language lessons, but this activity can be applied to any subject. 

Figure 1 Classroom list with assigned answer cards.

  • Practice tolerance, value differences and respect others. (e.g. not everyone answers correctly or at the same speed)
  • Cooperate, initiate dialogue, and teach students to be supportive. This can be achieved when working in groups.
  • Promote self-confidence and taking responsibility.
  • Know, value and respect basic aspects of other people's culture. Ana María teaches a foreign language and not all questions are about grammar or lexicon.

It can be intimidating to stand out and expose oneself to the whole classroom to answer a question. Plickers is physically analogous to raising hands; instead, each student raises a card, thus everyone participates. A simple and effective way to include everybody in classroom activities.

The teacher should first register on the website of Plickers. As the website is in English, it might be initially challenging to browse and discover how it works. But the tool is quite simple to use, and there are numerous videos and tutorials out there. Upon doing an internet search, teachers can easily find many resources, because the tool has a vast community of users from many countries. As a start, teachers can check this official help page (in English), or these official guidelines. 

The activity

Ana Maria creates and manages activities from her account. She virtually creates her class under the "Your classes" section and enter each student by: "Add students". She goes to "Your library" to create folders ("New folder") by course or topic to create tests within the folders. 

In the question editor, there are two test options: "Graded", where the questions can be graded, and "Survey", to make surveys. A picture can be added to each question. For the graded questions, it is possible to either give two to four answer options or choose true-false questions in "Set as True/False". Once the test has been completed, it must be added to the class/classes you choose in "Add to queue".

The cards with the codes are in "Help" + "Get Plickers cards" on the Plicker cards site. It is possible to get up to 40 here or here and up to 63 at here. These cards have a number to identify each student according to the order in which they are in the classes created, and 4 letters, which will be used to answer according to the option they think is correct or that they want to choose in the survey.

The questions are projected from the computer. Students read them and lift their code cards (Figure 2) rotated to give the option that they believe is correct (A, B, C or D). The teacher then scans the codes with her smartphone. The results will then be projected on the screen. 

The teacher pauses in between questions to explain the errors and the correct answer to provide corrective feedback to students. If it looks like students are struggling, or doing quite well, she can also decide to change the difficulty of questions for upcoming activities.

The teacher uses the questions like a poll at the beginning or end of a unit to assess the level of students’ understanding. She sometimes also uses it as a review quiz before a graded exam or at the end of a unit. This way she can organise a make-up session to address frequently occurring misconceptions. She prefers making tests no longer than 10 question for the beginning or end of unit, which takes between 5-15 minutes. For longer assessments of 20-25 questions, she dedicates up to a whole session.

The teacher can decide how much time to allow students to answer and what explanations are necessary after seeing the errors. Students usually answer in less than 30 seconds. If the classroom is very large, cards can be printed for teams both to make the assessment flow faster and to practice teamwork.

Figure 2 Students give their answers by raising their answer card, so that the teacher can scan them with a smartphone camera. Image taken from: https://intef.es/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Plickers-en-el-aula.pdf

Once the activity is finished, Ana Maria can monitor what were the best mastered questions and those that were the most challenging. She can also see whether students fall for incorrect options looking similar to the correct answer (Figure 3). 

She then reflects on what activity each student would need to improve and provides further exercises to help students develop. Then she proposes several solutions to students, e.g., activities she posted on her blog or an assignment on paper, depending on the internet access of each student.

Plickers is a tool aimed for use in a classroom without technology. In the case of distance learning, there are many online quiz tools that could be used for formative assessment like Quizizz, Kahoot, Quizlet.

Figure 3 Results of a question displayed from the teacher's computer for a French language lesson. Despite many correct answers, a very similar incorrect answer was also chosen; a typical mistake that the teacher can further address.

Outcomes and lessons learned

Ana María is very satisfied with her classes. “My students are happy with this type of assessment and prefer it over other types, because they don’t have to write, and they enjoy answering using the cards”. Students like to compete with their peers: answer before others, be in the group that responds correctly. Nevertheless, Ana María ensures that the classroom atmosphere stays friendly. This is a good opportunity to observe students’ behaviour and foster partnership. The game triggers also a certain level of competitiveness, which adds more fun to the activity. For instance, “students try to mislead other classmates by saying out loud an option that they believe is wrong, so others make a mistake.” says Ana María.

Students are always curious to discover their score at the end. The anticipation adds some excitement, and the nice visuals contribute to the gamification of it all. “I have been doing this type of evaluation at different times of the course for almost 3 years and students are always motivated, because they see it both as a competition, and a possibility to review aspects that they might have forgotten or understand other aspects that they have not assimilated.”

Figure 4 A classroom overview of all activities in a period of a day/week/month. The teacher can easily spot the areas of difficulty. Conveniently, tests can be reused; they are all stored in the teacher’s account. They can be reused either with other groups of the same level or including some of the questions from one test to another, as a check-up at the end of a unit or semester. A final note: teachers should always be aware of data privacy issues that especially free tools might entail. The Plickers privacy policy can be consulted here. 

Would you like to find out more? Check out Ana Maria’s post about Plickers on the INTEF website (Spanish).