This past week I worked with my class with an assessment tool called Plickers. Plickers, teachers create quick and easy assessment questions online; students’ reply by holding up a coded card, then the teacher scans it with a smartphone. The camera is able to scan across the room capturing data instantly.
I discovered that most of my special education students could easily get the concept of which way to orientate the card. The students thoroughly enjoyed using the cards and for the engagement reason alone I will continue to use it. They were excited about getting to do the ‘game show quiz’ (as they named it) and wanted to do ‘speed rounds’ (!)
The students also helped me create questions for the next day. When I told them that I needed their help in getting more questions they quickly offered to help and (didn’t meet the resistance that often occurs) each of the 5 students took one of the pages from our daily reading selection and found a question for the next days ‘game show’. Having them willingly go back into the book to find questions was a level of engagement rarely seen in our classroom.
One student H A T E D the Plickers program and would turn his card face down and even put his head down on the table. He couldn’t handle the (internal) pressure for answering questions. Even when I sat with him and offered him 1:1 assistance, his frustration tolerance level simply couldn’t handle it.
In using the system I found a couple of aggravating features. First, when trying to scan the student’s answer cards my phone crashed. It happened four times over the half hour lesson. This was annoying, but especially so when my students were so anxious to get on to the next question and keep ‘the game’ going. Upon reflection later that day I realized that I had my camera open on my phone too and perhaps that was interfering somehow with Plickers. The next morning I made sure to keep the camera turned off, but the app still crashed my phone twice.
The second thing that turned out to be annoying is that although I could print up a report displaying the questions and student responses, it only would list it as a class; I was unable to search just by student name and print up information for one student. Gathering individual results would have been an incredible advantage for the special education setting. Although I really enjoyed using the Plickers system, I’d probably not recommend it at this time based on the system crashing and lack of reporting capabilities.
Lewis is learning 