Clickers (also known as personal or classroom response systems) use radio frequency technology to transmit and record student responses. Students respond to faculty questions by "clicking" on buttons on their personal remote devices; a small receiving station, which is either permanently installed in the classroom or temporarily plugged in by faculty, collects and records each response. Instructors can choose to have students register their clickers, so that each students' individual response is recorded, or to answer anonymously.

Clickers are well-suited for active learning, enabling every student to respond to questions, even in large classes. Since they provide immediate feedback, both faculty and students can identify and correct misunderstandings during the course of a lecture. Among other activities, clickers are commonly used to take attendance, assess students' beliefs and prior understandings, administer low-stakes quizzes and facilitate peer learning.

Many DePaul classrooms have receiving stations already installed as part of standard classroom technology (contact Instructional Technology Development (ITD) for a list of equipped classrooms); faculty teaching in non-equipped classrooms will need to plug in a portable station before each class.

After an extended review by the Teaching, Learning and Technology committee, DePaul chose the i-Clicker as its standard classroom response system.

• Getting started with clickers
• Research on learning
• Resources and strategies
  - Overview of clicker activities and examples (Vanderbilt)
  - Using clickers for peer instruction
  - Writing effective questions
  - Best practices
  - Video demonstrations
• PowerPoint slides
  - Teaching at DePaul: Integrating the i-clicker into My Classroom
  - Example of a DePaul Faculty member's PowerPoint presentation
  - What Should New i-Clicker Users Know?
• Ways to use Clickers

Faculty Publications

Reinhardt, G., & Cook, L. (2006). Is this a game or a learning moment? Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education 4 (2), 301-305.

• Describes how to adapt exam review into a game
• Guides and instructions for the game can be found here.

Additional Resources and Readings

The Classroom response system bibliography from Vanderbilt's Center for Teaching includes:

• Literature reviews
• Scholarly articles
• Books
• Discipline-specific resources

Beatty, I. (2004) Transforming student learning with classroom communications systems. EDUCAUSE Center Appl. Research (ECAR) Res. Bull, 2004 (3), 1-13.

Crouch and Mazur. "Peer instruction: Ten years of experience and results." American Journal of Physics. 69 (9), September 2001.

Instructional Technology Development (ITD)

• Getting started with clickers
• Clickers training and workshops