Plickers! Technology Awesomeness!

Hi guys!  It's Debbie from over at K is for Kinderrific.   

I'm so excited about today's post and can't wait to share with you some technology awesomeness!!

Last week, the awesome tech person at my school (big shout-out to Mrs. Tibbs!!) introduced us to something called plickers. Yes, Plickers.   

Let me tell you what plickers are.  And what they do.  And how they will change your life. I'm not exaggerating.  #thisissofreakingcool

So have you seen the student response systems?  The ones that use clickers so students can input their answers???  They're awesome cool and students love them.  But they can be expensive.  And they're breakable.  They need batteries and they're sometimes hard to set up and manage.

Plickers are all the opposite.  

Plickers are like clickers. But affordable (free), unbreakable (paper), and simple to use!!

From the Plickers website....here's how it works:

-----Each student gets a unique barcode---a paper clicker!

-----Students answer questions by showing their barcodes to the teacher's smartphone.  

-----The teacher gets a real-time bar graph and the data is stored individually by student.  

Here's what a plicker looks like: 

Literally all you do is log on to their site and print a plicker off for each student.  Plickers are numbered which makes it easy to assign one to each student in your class.  Easy Peasy, right?

There is a Plickers app for iPhone and Droid.  It was very easy to set up.  You create questions in the app and choose the correct answer for each one.  Each question can have up to 4 answer choices A, B, C, or D.  

Notice that there are letters on each side of the Plicker.  After hearing a question, if students want to choose answer A, they hold their plicker up with the letter A on the top.  To choose B, they would hold it up with letter B on top.  

Once students have their answers up, all you have to do is open the app and scan the room.  You do NOT have to go from student to student scanning each individual's plicker.  In fact, it works better if you stand back a bit and scan the whole room at one time. 

It looks as if you are looking through your camera....and as your move your phone across the room, the app reads the student responses.  You can tell when the app has registered each response, because a little icon pops up right above the student's plicker.  So in real time you will be able to see the student's number and his or her answer selection (a, b, c, or d).    This whole process takes about 10 seconds to do!!!

But wait......There's MORE!!

The students' answers are automatically transformed into a real time bar graph or grid.  You can see who has answered and who has answered correctly or incorrectly.  

You can see this info right on your phone!

And also on your computer screen!  

As you can see in the photo above, student number 10 chose answer D, while all the other students chose answer B.  

(You can choose to not show student answers on the screen, so that only you can see who answered incorrectly.)

Is your mind blown????  Do you see all the possibilities this has?

Really!!! How cool is this!?

Students could easily keep their plickers in their desk all the time, and pull them out to review a few skills or even play a quick game!  

You definitely need to head over to the Plickers website and sign up!  It's FREE.  And easy.  And fun.

It'll be fun for you too, I promise!!