Using TurningPoint to unlock student achievement

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TurningPoint can make a synchronous teaching activity interactive, more engaging, improve students concentration as well as motivate allowing them to become aware of their individual learning inline with their peers.

TurningPoint enables lecturers to embed question polling in their presentations and allow learners to answer them with the aid of individual electronic clickers. Asking multiple questions with this technology is simple therefore the focus is purely on the learning, assessment and feedback, not the technology. The technology is simply a mechanism to aid the delivery of teaching, learning and assessment. The technology is versatile and the user can add questions on the fly with ease and even add a timer to question polling, forcing decisive decision-making. Planning a session based on this technology allows users to repeat patterns such as: asking a question, test for a response and then backup with information. Repeating this process provides a pleasant interactive learning experience. Alternatively a lecture delivery can easily become student lead based on their responses. If many of the audience provide wrong answers, the lecturer can go back to a slide and repeat the information.

Suddenly the structure of a teaching session becomes very flexible. For complicated questioning lectures can allows longer times and allow learners to discuss with each other, therefore assisting peer learning. Lecturers can ask the audience whether they feel they know a topic well before the lecture begins and then repeat the same question at the end to gage if there has been an improvement in their learning. Gaging the distance the students has travelled in their learning throughout the session could be vital for future session planning.

Responses can be anonymous or clickers can be assigned to students. Results can be fed directly into VLE’s such as Moodle or Blackboard  for analysis. In terms of analysis and post lecture reports, users can check individual answers, overall anonymous answers and even check attendance. Users can take the reports and place the information in excel for better analysis and create charts for example. If clickers have been matched to individual learners you can see if a student is performing well or not within certain questions.