Hi Jonathan,

Plickers indeed looks quite cool, mostly on how simple it's to set up. I
think it could be very useful in classrooms that the attendees are without
computers/mobiles (or you don't want them to be checking their favourite
social media while pretending to be answering a question). The only problem
I've found in a quick test on the app is that there's not a way to share
questions with other instructors, so you are locking your questions in your
account and makes the task to upload the questions only by doing so one by
one manually.  I've digged a bit and found that such feature is one of the
most asked - and they recognised that more than a year ago:

 -
https://plickers.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/214633907-Feature-Request-Sharing-Questions-

And in the feature request page this seems to be even from more that 2
years ago and multiple ones:

  -
https://plickers.uservoice.com/forums/194176-ideas/suggestions/6445678-allow-teachers-to-share-questions-with-each-other
  -
https://plickers.uservoice.com/forums/194176-ideas/suggestions/16323895-share-questions-with-other-teachers
  -
https://plickers.uservoice.com/forums/194176-ideas/suggestions/12307365-sharing-my-plicker-library-with-other-teachers
  -
https://plickers.uservoice.com/forums/194176-ideas/suggestions/7012455-publicly-shared-library-of-questions

I think a must in any teaching tool is to be able to share your work with
others, either within your team/school/institution or globally. If that
cannot be done then, for me, it's a waste of energy.

I've used a similar tool that I discovered in this mailing list for the
last 4 swc workshops: Socrative. The students need a computer to register
their answers but they don't need to create an account nor pur their real
names. There you have multiple modes on how to run the questions. I have
only used the "Teacher paced" and I have many of the questions duplicated,
so for each of these I ask them once - show the distribution of the results
in the screen - and ask them to answer it again in pairs. The distribution
then move all towards the correct question.
What's make socrative amazing is exaclty what I was complaining above of
plickers, you can share publicly the questions and other people can edit
these and make them better  :)

https://socrative.com/

Cheers,
David


On 3 February 2017 at 02:45, Guyer, Jonathan E. Dr. (Fed) <
[email protected]> wrote:

> I just returned from an overview of the math curriculum at my daughter's
> elementary school. The teacher was using a smartphone app and cards from
> https://plickers.com/ to scan the parents for answers to multiple-choice
> questions. Basically everybody gets a card with a unique pattern on it
> (sort of like a QR code). Depending on which way you hold it up, the
> smartphone app scanning across the room reads A,B,C,D and tallies answers
> live on their website. It seemed pretty cool. You can use it both for
> anonymous polling or you can can grade students by tracking which unique
> card they have.
>
> It seemed pretty cool and like it could integrate well into the Carpentry
> style of teaching. Has anybody used it?
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/listinfo/discuss
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