Using Cell Phones as Clickers

I wrote a while back about the use of cell phones in class. My first response to that idea was that there are some frontiers even the most tech-savvy among us are not willing to explore. But then I was coaxed into it by the folks at Poll Everywhere who shared with me that they had polling software that could be used with students' cell phones. So there's yet another alternative to the expensive clicker systems.

It works using text messaging. WAIT! DON'T STOP READING! If you don't already know how to text, it's actually pretty easy. For sure, it's no more difficult than making a phone call or sending an e-mail. The first step is to go to the Poll Everwhere site and create the poll, including the options that participants can choose. Then the site generates the text message that students will submit for each option. As students start weighing in, the results show up in real time on a slide that you can view from the site or that you can download into PowerPoint. If you don't want students to see the results until everyone has weighed in (and the site will tell you how many responses you've received), then you don't have to reveal the screen until then.

Below is the trial poll I did. The results are based on the 8 friends of mine who responded. Four said they wouldn't use cell phone polling; one said she would; and 3 want to wait and see what happens. The other 7 people I sent it to either didn't want to spend the money on the text message or couldn't figure out how to text message (or didn't want to serve as my teaching technology guinea pigs . . .). Obviously, that's not representative of our Millennial student population, but -- since it was a sample composed entirely of law professors -- I think it does say something about how many law professors are likely to use this.



Obviously, you can tell from the Poll Everwhere site that it's a company, not a non-profit like CALI just thinking of as much cool stuff as possible to share for free. However, the pricing on Poll Everwhere is still dramatically less than the pricing on the clicker systems. If you have a class of 30 or fewer students, then you can use it for free (for up to 1,000 responses, I think). So for those of us who teach small sections, it's free. For larger sections, the pricing starts at $9.99 per month.

There is the matter of the cost of text messaging to the student. However, with more and more cell phone plans offering unlimited text messaging, this becomes less of an issue, maybe even a non-issue. Granted, all students may not have cell phones, and all students certainly may not have the pricey plans that include unlimited texting. Poll Everywhere does offer an option for responding from a laptop. And the days when no student has either a cell phone for text messaging or a laptop are dwindling quickly.

So if you're feeling adventurous, give it a try!

Laptop Hide & Seek

A couple of years ago, K.K. DuVivier and Jill Ramsfield gave a presentation at the Legal Writing Institute's Biennial Conference called "Teaching to Eyebrows." Among other things, it addressed teaching to multi-tasking students. I loved that title; it perfectly captures the image of the law student hidden behind her laptop.

So a few weeks ago, I was at another law school and had the opportunity to observe a class in which the students all had 8 1/2 x 11 laminated printed placards with their names in 2" letters. I learned from the faculty at the law school that all students were required to place those placards in front of them in all classes (or was it jus first-year classes? I forget.). A lot of students -- on their own initiative -- had taped the placards to the front of their laptops.

Suddenly, the least visible became the most identifiable. Voila!

I haven't tried it yet, but I'm thinking about it for the fall.

Laptop Use from the Students' Perspectives

The Spartan, the San Jose State University Daily, has an interesting article on laptops. Professors at San Jose State have taken a variety of paths with regard to regulating laptop use in the classroom. Here are some of the things they've tried:

• Outright ban
• Requiring laptops and using Synchroneyes-type technology
• Allowing only handwritten notes to be used in the exam

That's the first I've heard of someone using that last one. That's pretty clever.

The students had plenty to say about professorial attitudes toward laptops:

"I think it's pointless," said Kimberly Knoll, a junior animation illustration major. "People are going to do it anyway, and there's no way to check. I think if they want to rohibit that then they need to specifically say, 'Laptop lids down.' One of my teachers used to say that when she gave her lectures."

Still, many students use their laptops in class for other things."Sometimes when the professor is really, really boring or going off in a tangent, I may check my e-mail," said Andrae Macapinlac, a junior political science major. "I said 'may,' though."

Milan Balinton, a junior communications studies major, said he agrees."Being a
college student, we also have jobs and important lives, and I'm also involved in the community on campus and try to multitask per se," he said.

Some said they are more accepting of the rule."The professor is the one who really teach the class, so he has the right to give out his own policy," said William Nguyen, a senior accounting major. "You don't like it? Take another course."

Fighting Fire with . . . ACME Dynamite

Please make welcome the newest "weapon" in the cat-and-mouse game between professors, students, and students' laptops: software called SYNCHRONEYES (it's seriously written in all capital letters in the marketing information). The web site boasts that the software "enable[s] you to keep students focused on learning and redirect their attention if they go off track. " Apparently, it allows a professor to monitor what every screen in the room is tuned to. From what I've heard, this kind of thing isn't new. This has been a tool available for computer lab-centered courses for a while. But it seems that it's now being used to manage laptop use in non-lab courses by making any classroom a laptop computer lab and allowing the professor to monitor everyone's . . . um . . . monitor.

Inside Higher Ed's University Daily describes SYNCHRONEYES this way:

Synchroneyes marks a major escalation in the classroom technology battle: The professor as spy-master.

With Syncroneyes, the professor can “view all the computer screens in the classroom and redirect the student’s attention if they digress from the lecture topic.”

“The professor is also able to control access . . . to the Internet or to specific computer applications by blocking students individually or as a group.”

While UD lectures and leads discussions and writes on the blackboard and reads texts aloud, she also, once Synchroneyes is installed, constantly scans all the screens in the room, judges each screen’s pertinence to the class, and shuts down the impertinent.

SYNCHRONEYES is brought to you by the same people who brought you SMART Boards (and let's be honest -- about half of every law faculty thinks that the "dry erase" technology is what makes it "smart") and Clickers (the pricey software and remote control system that has been replaced by free classroom polling Internet apps). And SYNCHRONEYES almost sounds cool until you remember that our job description is not "frustrate foil's attempts to do what they want with increasingly ridiculous solutions."

I have some questions about SYNCHRONEYES:

• If students who've used computers since infancy can't surf the web and pay attention in class at the same time, how is someone who played Frogger in an arcade supposed to monitor 30+ computer screens while conducting a class? And what about the chances of someone who doesn't even know what "playing Frogger in an arcade" means?
• Isn't watching a professor manipulate a classmates' screen going to be more distracting (i.e., more fun) than whatever the classmate was originally doing?
• Isn't it cheaper and faster to just say, "screens down"?
• Won't students just respond to SYNCHRONEYES with Invisibility Shield Technology?

Ultimately, I think that "solutions" like this are tempting because they play on whatever fears that laptops evoke. For some, the fear is that they're really not very good teachers after all, and now students are going to be able to finally just sit and watch TV instead. For some, the fear is that they're letting students down if they let them believe that they can do two things at once. For some, the fear is that they're being left behind. For some, the fear is that students are somehow mocking professors with their laptops. But like all fears, the real solution is rarely to manipulate the situation so that we don't feel the fear anymore. The solution is to face it head on.

Thanks to pal and former South Texas colleague Prof. Andrew Solomon for forwarding the University Daily post.

"What lawyer surfs the web in court?"

"Dear Millennial Law Prof:

Enough with the laptops! I've heard all the reasons why I should allow students to use them in class, but here's one good one to ban them: what competent lawyer will surf the web in court?"

Good question. There are a lot of issues wrapped up in this one question. A big one is the difference between using a laptop and using the Internet. For now, though, let's set that aside and look at the more practice-oriented than law-school-oriented issue. I think this is really about envisioning the future of law practice. As Prof. David Thomson is want to say, our job is preparing students for their future, not our past.

When I was in law school [sic 'em bears], we were told that lawyers had to have their attention everywhere at once: the witness in the box, the jury, the judge, opposing counsel, the door into the courtroom. For generations of lawyers, attending to multiple tasks at once (see where this is going?) was a new skill they learned in law school and honed in practice. Now, multi-tasking is something that students come to law school already knowing how to do. Certainly, very few of them know how to do it with the focus and precision required of lawyer. But the multi-tasking that Millennials have grown up with is not so different in kind from the multi-tasking that's part of our craft. Opening the trial notebook to exactly the right place in the deposition, flipping through the well-worn and dog-eared (or Post-It flagged!) rules of evidence, and maintaining a rhythm to cross-examination are all multi-tasking skills. Access to a laptop and an Internet connection makes most of these tasks easier, not harder.

So what lawyer will surf the web in court? My guess is that, in the future, all of the good ones will.