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The new tool for the sociology department and possibly a new way of learning for students is the classroom performance system, or simply clickers, as everyone likes to call them.
It will allow teachers and students to communicate more effectively like voting on different statements made by the professor with a yes or no, or a true or false answer registered on the professor's laptop.
This system not only keeps track of all questions asked, but also it keeps up with who made what responses, allowing the professor to send grades to a grade book and upload results to the Internet.
This could not only alert the teachers to the student's understanding of the class material being covered, but also it could be used in conferences with students in determining what they need to study.
A clicker looks like a television remote control and allows students to respond immediately to statements or questions made by the professor for instant class surveys.
These statements will have answers labeled as either a, b, c or d, all of the above or none of the above. Students will purchase one of these when buying their books for the classes that will use them.
The new devices have a lot of conveniences, and could take the place of the widely used Scantron that students must have when taking a test.
The McGraw Hill companies has partnered with a company called Einstruction located in Denton and has a Web site, www.einstruction.com, that offers teachers more than 25 instructional videos and a PDF download that has an instruction book of about 300 pages in it.
They also offer an instructor help line, (888) 333-4988, student help line, (888) 333-7532; and customer support with live chat for both instructors and students.
Students would purchase keypads in the bookstore for $16 to $25 and register keypads at CPSOnline and pay another $15 per semester registration fee, which would be reduced to $6 if the student purchased a new textbook from McGraw Hill.
Paul Moorman, eLearning Consultant for McGraw-Hill, said that if students were taking more than one class that required a keypad, there would be only one activation fee provided each class used the same keypad for each class.
Dr. Carol Keller, history department, used the clickers for three semesters in 1994 and 1995 and said students liked the clickers, especially the students whose first language was not English because when they got something wrong and she showed a graph of how many of the other students missed the same question, they didn't feel so bad.
The clickers have enormous potential, but they are usually for classes of 300 or more students.
The reason that she quit using the clickers was that at the time there were a lot of viruses going around that changed her computer and IT never got the software to work properly and this discouraged the students.
Keller said she was going to use the clickers next semester with her sophomore class of world history and if everything worked out, she would try it with the rest of her classes.
Instructor Tina Yarbrough, who has used the clickers for the past three semesters, said the students felt more involved in the class because they have some input through the questions that were given and the results shown to the class and the different answers discussed.
Yarbrough said she liked the capabilities of data slicing because she could ask several polling questions, feeding the answers into the computer and then be able to see the relationship in relation to race, gender, age, nationality, etc.
Using the clickers eliminates the need to take roll or to use Scantrons for tests. The new system will even allow students to go online and get their grade minutes after taking the test.
Questions and polls can be written out in PowerPoint or there are questions furnished by the textbook manufacturer.
Criminal justice sophomore Aurora Gomez said she thought the clickers were simple and easy, very convenient and she liked being anonymous.
Liberal arts sophomore Mohammed Rhman said he thought they were pretty good and could not say anything negative about them.
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