Have you ever imagined how big challenge it is for a lecturer to encourage active learning within a large classroom full of students?Let me explain you with the most common situation faced by every lecturer and his/her students in their routine life.
A lecturer enters a big lecture hall with a setting capacity of 300 students. Some enthusiastic students already arrive before the session and simply take over the entire front rows. But, many students arrive at the last moment and somehow managed to find seats in the middle rows. Some students are still arriving even after the lecture has been started by the lecturer and are left with no other choice but to sit at secluded back benches. Front benchers get an advantage to listen to each and every word uttered out of the mouth of the lecturer but back benchers manage to hear just few words and are often distracted with other things like mobile phones, laptops etc. And that’s how the lecture goes on.
No doubt about the fact that large classrooms face several pedagogical challenges like these including lack of creating opportunities for student participation is the teaching session, difficulty in gauging pupil’s progress and lack of input and interaction technologies but still solution exists.
Audience Response System is that one solution which is extremely helpful in facilitating active learning in large enrollment classrooms.
It is a very popular and helpful teaching tool which is getting used in most of the schools and colleges across the world. Commonly known as clickers, these look like a mobile phone or a remote control. A teacher can easily use a classroom response system handset to ask multiple choice questions from the students during a class lecture. In response to it, students can feed in their answers in the format of true/false, yes/no, multiple choices, numeric and text in their respective response systems handsets which gets stored into the database of the computer. In return, teacher can display all the answers in the form of reports, table, graph and pie chart for students to see.
Genee’s audience response systems are the best classroom response systems available today. Best of all, these clickers are cost effective and intelligently designed for both educational and corporate sectors. Trainers, presenters and educators can rapidly and efficiently collect real-time data from participants and display results with these interactive response systems. Amazingly, these come in three different models- Genee pad, iQ pad and pebble pad. Each carries an exclusive quality of its own. Ergonomically designed, these clickers are perfect for younger students as well.
However, the trendiest technology which is gaining a special place in classrooms of today is virtual response system. In other words, it is the technology that allows students to be actively involved in real time classroom sessions without the need of handsets or clickers. With a virtual G pad students can easily attend important classroom sessions even by being absent from the classroom.
