With BClicker Every Classroom is an Instant Poll Station
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With BClicker Every Classroom is an Instant Poll Station

BOCCONI PROFESSORS CAN ASK QUESTIONS AND INTERACT WITH STUDENTS THANKS TO A NEW APP ACCESSIBLE BY PC, MAC, TABLET AND SMARTPHONE. AND IN A FEW SECONDS THEY OBTAIN AN OVERVIEW OF THE STUDENTS' RESPONSES

Imagine you’re a teacher who wants to know the orientation of a class about a case you’ve just described. You can ask students to show their hands and take a stand, but how many of them will respond to your call and expose themselves? Now, imagine you want to probe the students’ comprehension of yesterday’s lesson. How many can you test? How much time does it take? In both cases, the best you can get is a rough understanding of what’s going on in your classroom. But that was until yesterday. An app called BClicker solves these and many other problems giving teachers an instant and exact comprehension of their students’ knowledge.

BClicker enables professors to create and share multiple choice questions or polls with students. Suitable for both qualitative and quantitative courses, it’s a web application created by Bocconi Education & Teaching Alliance (BETA), Academic Affairs Division (Graziano Pravettoni and Sara Prati), Information Systems, Logistics and Infrastructures, library, schools. It benefits from the spread of mobile connected devices among students and it’s accessible through PC, Mac, tablet and smartphone. It’s as simple as useful: professors access BClicker on their browser, create questions and answers, set rules like the amount of time students have to answer, invite the classroom to join the session. And then in a few seconds they have an overview of the students’ responses.

“It generates interactivity and forces students to stop and think”, Luigi Proserpio, president of BETA, says. “It can also be used as an unbiased tool to evaluate class participation at the end of the year because every session is kept in the app memory”. It’s excellent for continuous assessment, it’s a way to keep students up to date and help them to develop long term memory. And it’s a tool to kick off discussions. Ask Ariela Caglio, who used it during her Performance Management course: «Students weren’t inclined to share their ideas. Discussions were lifeless. Once I’ve projected BClicker’s results on the classroom screen the debate caught fire and everyone was more willing to expose themselves».

“BClicker was developed at the request of teachers”, Valentina Todoro, project manager and instructional designer at BETA, says. “They wanted to test their students’ knowledge, so they asked for clickers”. A clicker is a small remote control that allows you to choose between a few options, just like the ones used in tv game shows. They’re expensive and inconvenient when it comes to supply 100 students and they’re last century’s technology. An app does a better job and opens up new possibilities.

“I tested BClicker during both my Diritto Modulo 2 and Introduction to the Legal System Module 2 courses”, says Elisa Bertolini. “I used it to review the previous lessons and to simulate the final exam which consisted of open ended and multiple choice questions. It increased interactivity, gave me a reliable feedback of what the class had learned, prompted students to study on an ongoing basis”. They appreciated it. In the mid-semester evaluation students’ feedback on BClicker has been very positive.



by Claudio Todesco

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