The Internet has for long received accolades for being an important tool in education.
As technology continues to advance, there are new developments boiling even down to the classrooms, case and point – the classroom clickers.
Classroom Clickers come in many different forms depending on what is needed in the classroom. You can even get smartphone based “classroom clicker apps”.
These gadgets have invaded the classroom and changed the whole scene, students need to have one and listening is imperative.
Though they come with many promising advantages, they also come with a few bottlenecks.
1. They lock out the weaker student
With clickers in the class, the propensity to stir up debates is very high, especially when students have varying answers or the class splits in to two opposing camps.
Though the fact that students are active in the discussions is admirable, the fact of the matter is, the weaker voices will not be able to offer their contribution.
Psychologically, the students locked out of the debate feel left out and alienated from the class.
This leads to; poor grades or loss of interest in the class altogether, which then goes to harm the grades of these students.
2. They lose time
Owing to the frank nature of the discussions that might take place in the classes due to these gadgets, the teachers will lose time during class and the course work might not be complete in the required time.
These gadgets need to be understood so that they are used properly, this needs some sort of training, which means some part of the initial classes will be used to train the students and the lecturers on how to use the gadgets.
3. Their success depends on the lecturer
These gadgets are designed to collect data on questions posed by lecturers. Collecting opinionated data requires the element of surprise. If the lecturers of a class were seemingly predictable, it would be easy to doctor the results.
Students get to know their lecturers, and so with time they can be able to anticipate what the lecturer might ask. History also plays an important part of these lecturers; the lecturers then need to update their notes with every class, which is tedious considering the education course work does not change.
4. Increases possibility of cheating
The use of these gadgets in pop quizzes or exams is an encouragement to the students to cheat in their exams.
Consider a scenario where answering of questions takes a moment of thinking or some time to do so, students who are not sure of the answer will not fight the temptation to ask their friends. There seems to be no means of mitigating this, which should be a cause of concern.
