Polling Gizmos

iClicker Basics

The iClicker website provides a nice overview of the system. Here you will find some tools and ideas for use of the system.

Observations

Marisa Belk has provided a beamer presentation file template such as might be used with items from the Good Questions Project

• iclicker_Good_Qs.tex: Beamer (LaTeX) file for creating slides of questions from the Good Questions Project
• http://www.math.cornell.edu/~GoodQuestions/materials.html these files are already in LaTeX

• CIT has some resources at: http://www.cit.cornell.edu/services/polling/ -- DickFurnas - 13 May 2008
• The documentation refers to your presentation application, but in fact it's simply the screen. The Question logs and screen captures are exactly that -- screen captures. While you can have a PDF or ppt in full screen mode, you could also have several windows open in different applications and pose a question, take feedback, cycle among applications, whatever. A genuinely interactive presentation could involve a live comparison of Sage, Maple, Matlab and Mathematica with active windows in all four applications. You could pose a problem and poll as to which application is nicely suited to the problem, explore methods of solution in each application, poll for alternative methods of solution and poll for a final opinion... -- DickFurnas - 04 Apr 2008
• Fun thing to try:
  • Tell the class to try to get all bars in the histogram to be the same height without talking to each other.
  • Now have them try to do it with their eyes closed -- DickFurnas - 28 Mar 2008

Novel Questions:

• Demographic: Assorted possibilities --
  • What is your Gender
  • What is your Ethnicity
  • Are you a Math Major?
  • What Math did you take in High School?
    -- DickFurnas - 13 May 2008
• Demographic: Approximately how long has it been since your last math class?
  1. 1 Semester.
  2. 1 Year.
  3. 2 Years.
  4. 3 Years.
  5. More than 5 years.
     -- DickFurnas - 13 May 2008
• Demographic: What year are you?
  1. Freshman
  2. Sophomore
  3. Junior
  4. Senior
  5. Other
     -- DickFurnas - 13 May 2008

Goodies

• iclicker.zip: iClicker USB Drive Original Contents Populate your own USB drive with the contents of this zip file.
• UserGuide.pdf: iClicker User Guide
• SetupInstructions.pdf: Setup Instructions
• Course Templates Unzip and rename the resulting folder to the name of your course.
  • MyCoursePC.zip: :pc: Template for a Course whose instructor is using a PC
  • MyCourseMac.zip: :mac: Template for a course whose instructor is using a Mac

A Course Template folder is a self-contained folder with all of the course data files and the applications used to collect the results of polls, display the results on screen and look deeper into the results associated with a course. The data in the folder includes:

• The iClicker application
• The iGrader application
• An application used to keep the iClicker and iGrader applications up to date.
• The Student roster ROSTER.TXT listing the names of the students in the course.
• The Session Data Folder which contains:
  • RemoteID.csv the file listing the serial numbers of the iClickers in use and (optionally) the correspondence to the student owning the clicker.
  • Config.csv where course preferences are stored (configured through the applications)
  • other *.csv files with student responses to each question including number of responses, first response, final response and the time the responses were recorded.
  • *.raw files with raw data of student responses to each question including number of responses, first response, final response and the time the responses were recorded.
  • Files matching *Qn.jpg Screen shot for question n taken at the moment polling began.
  • Files matching *Cn.jpg Chart with the histogram of student responses to question n .

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-- DickFurnas - 28 Mar 2008