Many schools across the country, from the elementary to post-secondary level, are integrating new technology into the classroom to make lessons more interactive. According to NBC Universal, classes at the University of Pennsylvania are integrating clickers, or remote response units that allow instructors to ask the students questions and then immediately gauge the results on an interactive whiteboard.
Classroom tools like an interactive whiteboard, wireless response system or
DLP projector can give professors an advantage in large lecture settings, encouraging engagement in an environment that may typically lend itself to passivity on the part of the students. Interactive clickers can make students active participants in a class of hundreds, for example.
In science and math classes, like Professor Paul Heiney's physics course at Penn, the instructor can look at class response data in real time, moving through principles that students comprehend easily and focusing on more complex topics.
In liberal arts classes, the technology's applications are more open-ended. Sociology students, for example, can respond to an open-ended multiple choice question and look at statistical data immediately, acting as their own test demographic.
"They're entirely educational in nature," Vanderbilt University's Derek Bruff said of the clickers, "and yet they add a level of interaction and interactivity that students really appreciate in class."
