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TurningPoint Student Response System
8/11/2004
For these reasons when I was scheduled to lead a panel at the Syllabus2004 conference in Berkeley I was glad for the opportunity to use a personal response system. Turning Technologies volunteered to provide the equipment for the session, the software, the training I would need, and lastly the support at the auditorium. The experience was addictive. Once you have presented this way it will seem a waste of time and energy to do otherwise. You can present so much better if you ask the audience what they think, what they are interested in, and whether they understood your presentation.
Turning Technologies is primarily a software company. They offer fully integrated packages but they can also use the devices you already have on hand. For the Syllabus conference they brought top-of-the-line RF hand held units. This way the audience didn't have to point the devices, useful in this context, but no big deal in a class. Professors tell me students learn very quickly how to point their less expensive IR devices right at the closest receiver, which in most cases looks like a small red dot in the ceiling or on a side wall.
I have mixed feelings about the current shape of the TurningPoint software. It is so full of features. It's the epitome of feature creep. They have thought of everything. If you want it, this software can do it. I cannot begin to tell you all that it can do. I used the basics-a yes/no question, multiple choice questions, Likert scale questions. Each of them with a count down timer. Then I correlated two demographic questions with the audience responses to content and opinion questions, and at the end I re-asked my beginning question and showed the percentage of change from the beginning of the session. And I would call myself a rank beginner. I would prefer to introduce my professors to a simpler interface. I asked the Turning folks if they had a TurningPoint Light for the classroom. They said they haven't felt a need and that they have many professors using the software in class. I guess they should know. They know how to ask.
As you can probably guess, this is a Windows-based system, not available for
the Mac. Simple direct interface is not a value here. The software uses PowerPoint
so all you know about PowerPoint you can use here. Then it overlays another
set of features in the TurningPoint bar. You can right click your way into loads
of other menus. Excel is involved in making the charts. It is really pretty
simple to pull down a question type and then fill in the text you want. You
can select what kind of graph it will use. If you stopped there you might have
a good presentation. But then you have all those PowerPoint features you already
know, and then there is a menu item that looks like a pair of eyeglasses. Let's
see what will do. What if I right click on one of these. Pretty soon you are
in trouble. But then again you might be the type who will thrive in this presentation
supermarket.
After you are all prepared you run through your presentation in the demonstration
mode. The software provides you with a random set of student answers so you
can get an idea of how things will look.
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