Voting Systems
I’ve linked here to a report by Falkirk Council which compares various types of voting system.
At the moment I think voting systems have a limited place in the curriculum, are too expensive, are not as reliable as they need to be, can be difficult to set up, time consuming to create questions and are difficult to organise in a busy classroom.
If you’ve had a more positive experience with voting systems, let me know.
I forwarded the permalink of this post to the Becta ICT forum where someone was asking just this morning about voting systems. Nice and timely - thanks!
I was very sceptical about voting systems until I used them with a class. The response from the students was surprisingly positive and it made me think there may be something in them after all. However, I think they would need to come down in price significantly before I would give a whoe-hearted recomendation.
I used a system called PRS which is fairly naff compared to the Quizdom stuff Ollie was showing. However, setting up questions in Powerpoint is pretty straightforward as PRS gives you a wee toolbar in Powerpoint that does the buisness for you. I’m usually taking the time to make up a presentation anyway, so for me there is very little overhead in adding the questions. What does take a bit longer is thinking up the questions in the first place and working out where to put them.
Major downside for me is that I can’t fit as much in when I’m asking questions with this system because of the increase interaction with the learners. Major upside is that there is increased interaction with the learners so it stops me cramming too much in.
Swings and roundabouts!
[...] I came across a useful article from Falkirk council on the various hardware that is available from Andy Watson’s edublog: http://andywatson.edublogs.org/2006/03/27/voting-systems/ [...]
Whoops! Fingers too fast….
What I was going to say is that we have made a first tentative foray into using these in first year University lectures (up to 350 students) as a way of increasing student engagement with that material.
In the course that I run, we had been using coloured cards to the same end for a few years, so had already got over some of the hurdles about what makes a good question and what to do about not being able to fit in as much content.