One at a Time vs. All at Once.
There are two main ways to deliver a CPS clicker lesson, student-paced and teacher-led. My kids call them one-at-time and all-at-once. I use both methods, depending on the situation. Ironically enough, the kids seem to prefer the teacher-led to the student-paced.
In the teacher-led mode, the questions show up one at a time, with the answers displayed, along with a grid that shows which clickers have answered. You set the timer, and then the correct answer is displayed, as well as how many kids chose each answer. It’s called teacher-led because you advance it to the next question, but you can also set it to advance automatically.
Teacher-led
This mode is good for warm ups and the like. It’s great for stopping after each question and using that teachable moment: “Now it looks like several of you thought it was D, and I can see what you were thinking. Here’s why the correct answer is A.” And so forth. In this mode, you can have up to 8 choices. When we have a warm up with multiple questions, the kids like this way better, because they say they like getting the answer after every question, instead of having to wait until the end. Also, the smart ones pick up clues from those answers to help with the later questions, something you can’t do in student-paced mode, so they always try to talk me into using that mode on quizzes and tests.
Student-paced mode is what we use for those quizzes, tests and pretests. In this mode, I either display all the questions above the clicker grid (see the pic below), or for longer tests, I hand out an actual piece of paper, and just display the grid. The top number is their clicker number, and the bottom one is the question they are on.
This is what I use for almost every one of my tests and quizzes. We also usually use this mode on pretests, and then I use my CPS wireless slate to mark up the screen as we go over the answers. Then we look at the stats, as we call them (more on that in another post).
I also use this mode for warm ups on those days when I have homework to check. I can put up all the questions, set my timer, and get them copying and clicking while I circulate through the room and check whatever I need to check. The drawback of this mode is that, since the F button is shared the fast-forward function, you can only have 5 choices. (I found that out the hard way the very first time we used clickers: “It won’t let me choose F! It keeps fast-forwarding through the questions!”)
There are plenty of other ways to use your CPS clickers, and we’ll get into those soon, but these two are the bread and butter of my classroom these days.