Teaching with Technology- Using Poll Everywhere in Microbiology

With spring break behind us, we are now in full-swing of the second half of the semester, which means that I am pretty much teaching full-time… three one-hour long lectures a week, plus a three-hour lab. It is going very well, and I feel really at-home now at my teaching insitution. I really enjoy getting to know my students, and feel that we have established a very respectful, amicable relationship in the classroom. Not one to be complacent with falling into a groove of happy monotony, I decided it was time to break the routine and start using some active learning techniques with technology: Poll Everywhere (PE). What has held me back until now, you may ask? The fact that I myself was not super comfortable yet with using PE, and I honestly did not have the time to sit down and really play with it. I was not about to throw my students into using something that I had no idea how to use myself… how would I answer their questions, or fix something that was not working? But, after using PE last year in one of my Preparing Future Faculty courses, I knew it was something I wanted to use in the classroom. For those of you who are not familiar with it, Poll Everywhere is an online polling system that allows students/audience members to “vote” on questions that you pose using a cell phone or laptop (by text message, twitter, or going to the PE website). The PE website compiles the “votes” and displays them in real-time for you and your audience members to see. It is a really cool tool that allows students to use the technology that they love to test their knowledge on content presented in class. I like it because you get instant feedback on whether or not the content you just delivered was received and processed, or just went in one ear and out the other.
From my survey at the beginning of the semester, I knew that most of the students have a smart phone and an unlimited text-messaging plan; we were essentially good to go. Last week I decided I wanted to use PE for a review-style class session, but I kept putting off the time to sit down and learn about how I would use it. Finally, the night before class, I could put it off no longer. Honestly, I think I kept putting it off because I had a small fear of trying something new and it failing miserably. So, with just barely 12 hours until I gave my next class, I settled down with my laptop and the http://www.polleverywhere.com website. I was amused at how easy it was to set up an account (which is free to use for audiences smaller than 40 people- I have 29 students) and get started. I literally had a poll up and running in less than 5 minutes, and my entire classroom polling session written in less than 15. I practiced with my own cell phone by text message, and was hit with that first-time wonder when it actually worked… my message appeared on the poll page in less than 2 seconds. As long as the internet connection is good, the real-time response is pretty impressive! Now, to try it with the students….
Unfortunately, my leisurely morning of getting to school early to setup for class and make sure everything worked was shot to heck when I was stuck in traffic for over an hour on my way in. I made it to class with 2 minutes to spare, which was barely enough time to set up my laptop and have copies of the quiz made. I hate that rushed feeling, and it makes my heart race like everything else I have to do must also be rushed. The start of class was a little rough for me… I felt panicked (even though I made it there just in time, I didn’t have the one hour that I had planned on to look over things again before I did my lecture) and unprepared. Those feelings were unnecessary- I just wrote the presentation the night before, so it was plenty fresh in my mind. The lecture part went just fine, as it usually does, and before I knew it, it was time to try out the PE. I described how it worked, and laid out my expectations for how they would respond (for example, if anyone posted anything inappropriate for the open-ended questions, we would stop using PE altogether.) We did a test run, where everyone polled in their initials; if they showed up on the screen for all to see, they would know that their message was received. Exclamations of glee popped up all over the class, along with shouts of “there I am!” and “that’s me!” I could tell already that this was going to be awesome. After working through a few hiccups with a handful of students, we were all using PE and ready to go. I had a set of 10 questions based on the material they just covered (some multiple choice, some open-ended). I would pose the question, and give them 2-3 minutes to respond. The first couple questions had great response rates, but I noticed as class went on, the numbers dropped. Towards the end, we had barely half the class responding… I think they were burning out as class had been going on for nearly 2 hours at this point (it was a 3-hour lab day, but due to the Good Friday holiday and next week’s exam, we used it as a 2-hour lecture and review session). It ended up taking much longer than I anticipated, as they took some time to poll in responses, and then we discussed the answers afterwards (“why did you choose the answer that you did?”). In the end, when I asked if they wanted to use PE again, I got a resounding “YES!” as the response. So overall, I feel that the PE experiment went very well, and I will be using it again soon (as long as the wireless internet works in our room… some days it does not, as I found out yesterday). What was even more awesome was the fact that my co-teaching partner is now hoping to use PE in his classes, as well as my teaching mentor! I think it is easier to adopt something new when you see it in action and see how successful it can be; hopefully this will be one step towards changing traditional pedagogy at my teaching institution and opening the doors for new ways of teaching/learning!