By Daniel Jamous, Senior Instructional Technologist for FAS ATG
One of the benefits resulting from the adoption of the Canvas Learning Management System has been the integration with third-party tools.
An example of this is the Turning Technologies clicker registration app. For several years, many courses in FAS, particularly in the Sciences, have used Turning Technologies clickers in the classroom to make lectures more interactive and to gauge students’ understanding of the materials through polling. In a typical situation, students are asked several multiple-choice questions during each lecture and receive credit for answering them (they don’t have to provide the right answer as long as their responses fall within the questions’ choices). The points thus received count for the students' participation grade.
Here's an example of a clicker question from course Physical Sciences 11, taught by Profs. James Anderson and Gregg Tucci.
Prior to Canvas, the steps of registering clickers and sharing session results with students was done separately outside of the learning management system. With the current integration, students can register their clickers directly into Canvas, which then allows instructors to download a class roster from Canvas ready to use in the TurningPoint polling software.
But perhaps the most beneficial feature of the Turning Technologies integration is the ability to seamlessly export students' clicker points from TurningPoint directly into the Canvas gradebook. With just a few clicks, instructors can export a TurningPoint session with all the students’ points and names after each lecture. Canvas in turn sends notifications to students who are immediately informed of their participation grades.
Life Sciences 1b, and Physical Sciences 1 and 11 successfully used this feature in Spring 2016, as did Music 2: Foundations of Tonal Music, and we expect the usage will keep increasing over future semesters.
For more information consult the Integration Resources page on Turning Technologies website.