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GCCC Students Click Their Way to Correct Answers: Remote Learning

Posted on: Sunday, 4 June 2006, 15:00 CDT

By S. Brady Calhoun, The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.

Jun. 4--PANAMA CITY -- While Lynn Wallace taught his lesson, his students kept clicking on blue remote controls.

They held their remotes high and sideways, to the left or to the right, as they searched for a signal.

Wallace, an assistant professor of English at Gulf Coast Community College, encouraged the behavior as he went through a series of grammar questions in his "smart" classroom.

Using a computer and a projector with the remotes, he asked the class the difference between "are and our,""your and you're" and a host of other homonyms. Without saying a word, his students responded and he evaluated them in seconds.

"Half of you got it," Wallace said at one point. "It's amazing how many people make mistakes with these words."

Then, moments later, Wallace looked at a question he created and realized he had given the class the wrong answer. Half of the class got it right anyway.

"You caught me," he said. "The teacher wrote down the wrong answer."

Gulf Coast Community College spends $500,000 a year on classroom technology that is supposed to help students and teachers come up with the right answers. The money goes to computers, software, training and dozens of other classroom needs.

The latest bit of tech is called "clickers." In a clicker classroom, the students are given remote controls that they use to answer questions presented by the instructor. The clickers can be set up for tests, games or as anonymous practice. Wallace was using the anonymous function last week as he got his class ready for a grammar test.

By making the class responses anonymous, Wallace can get answers from everyone, evaluate how they are doing and decide if he needs to spend more time on a subject or if he can move on to new frontiers.

The students "don't have to feel put on the spot," Wallace said.

The anonymous aspect opens up a host of communication channels, said Cheryl Flax-Hyman, the director of developmental studies at Gulf Coast. For instance, in an ethics class a teacher might ask the students some hard questions.

"How many of you would cheat if you knew you couldn't get caught?" Flax-Hyman said as an example.

While the class members might have some reservations about honestly answering that question, they should have no qualms with an anonymous click, Flax-Hyman said.

"We never stop looking for ways to reach students," she added. But, "We haven't lost the art of lecturing."

The clicker technology costs $2,000 per classroom, and Gulf Coast continues to investigate which classes are best suited for the program.

Herman Daniels, the director of computer services for the college, said a technology committee examines each new product for months, sometimes for as long as year, before they implement it across the campus.

Daniels said that with each new teaching tool some professors hop on early while others are slow to adapt.

"We have a very technologyliterate faculty out here," Daniels added.

The program won over some faculty members at a recent meeting, Flax-Hyman said.

"They love it," she added. "They were finally told to put the clickers down."

And while some may want to jump on every new gadget that comes along, the college makes sure it's the right gadget for the right reasons at the right time, Daniels said.

"We don't believe in technology for technology's sake," Daniels said. "We believe in technology for enhancement of the education process. We use a lot of technology to teach, but the real emphasis is not technology. The real emphasis is still the teaching."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The News Herald, Panama City, Fla.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The News Herald

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