Image by Enrico Fuente

 

Clickers are great for adding interactivity to the classroom. The best thing is they allow some interactivity but not too much. They scale. Like Twitter does.  However they cost lost and can be fiddly to set up and annoying to mind and maintain. What are the alternatives?

Online polling: Most famously the free system Doodle which has been taking the web by storm over the past year. Highly recommended for sheduling meetings but can also be used to run polls.

TwtPoll or PollDaddy for Twitter. I just Googled these and have never set up a twitter poll but Twitter is a natural environment for polling. In fact why not just use twitter altogether as a classroom participation medium? You need devices and you need rules but the technology is free and simple to use if you  can crack the hardware nut and get something into the hands of your learners.

If you use Moodle simply add a “Choice” activity type or check out the Q&A forum which you can configure so that users can only see other contributions once they make one themselves. What has that got to do with polls? Its about making people contribute. And they only need to contribute in a small way. 

SMS polls: I mentioned these previously and I wrote some software for Nokia NSeries phones that effectively turns your phone into a router and would allow you to run Twitter-style interactions in a classroom using SMS only i.e. no web or special software required on the phones. This would be perfect say for a conference to allow listeners to spontaneously interact and hopefully I will demo this some day at a conference (invite me please!). Hopefully I will also get around to polishing this software and releasing it to anyone who wants it.  Or it would make great student project…