Digital clickers are interactive learning technologies that provide teachers with an effective way to collect data about their teaching and engage students in learning. Clickers can be used for a various purposes.
For instance, teachers can use them to conduct quick formative assessments using short quizzes, polls, exit tickets, surveys and more. Responses are collected and graded in real-time providing teachers with important analytic insights on students performance and progress.
1. Kahoot
Kahoot is a game-based platform that allows you to engage your students through a wide range of games (kahoots) and challenges. You can either create a kahoot from scratch or use one of the pre-designed templates. Kahoot offers 6 editable templates to choose from. Each kahoot can include various types of questions (e.g., quiz, true or false, poll, puzzle, open ended).
Kahoot' s question editor includes a math equation editor allowing you to insert different mathematical symbols into your questions. Reports is the section in your Kahoot account where you can view stats about your students performance and track their progress.
For instance, in the Summary part, you will access insights on how many students took part in the kahoot, how many of them provided answers, which questions were the most difficult, which students need help, and many more.
2. Mentimeter
Mentimeter is a polling tool that enables you to create interactive presentations and quizzes with real-time voting. The way it works is simple: use the tool's editor to create interactive slides that contain various question types (e.g., multiple choice, word cloud, open ended, scales, ranking, and Q&A).
When your quiz is ready, share the generated code with your participants who can join using any mobile device with Internet connection. Participants can answer questions and view their results in real time. Final results can be downloaded and exported for later analysis.
3. Quizlet
Quizlet is another clicker app that allow teachers to create game-based quizzes to share with students. It also offers polling and survey making features to use to collect students feedback and test their comprehension.
As students submit their responses, you get to access analytic insights regarding their performance. Some important features provided by Quizlet include Quizlet Live (a collaborative classroom game) Quizlet Checkpoint (includes quick activities to test students knowledge in real time).
4. Socrative Teacher
Socrative Teacher helps you engage students through formative assessments using quizzes, question polls, exit tickets, and space races. 'Socrative will instantly grade, aggregate and provide visuals of results to help you identify opportunities for further instruction...
To get started using Socrative, simply register for a Socrative Teacher account. Your Socrative account will work with other Socrative Apps and via all browsers. Students can connect to your unique room by opening their apps or joining your room on Socrative from any device.'
5. Quizalize
Quizalize is a game-based quiz making tool that allows you to enhance students engagement and boost their participation. You can create different types of quizzes either from scratch or using a ready-made template.
You can add your questions or import them from a spreadsheet, and set the quiz duration (from 5 seconds to 5 minutes). Your quizzes can include images, audio, text-to-speech, among others.
When your quiz is complete you can save it to My Library or assign it to your class right away and select Play in Class so students can take it in one of two modes: Play Leaderboard (students performance is projected live on the screen) or Team Vs Team (Students names appear on the screen and with every answer students names get closer to the flag in the middle).
As students take their quiz, you can use Quizalize analytic reports to access performance data and track students progress.
6. Quizizz
Quizizz enables you to create both teacher-paced and student-paced quizzes and lessons. Your quizzes cam embed various types of questions (multiple choice, open ended, polls, fill in the blanks, etc.) and media (e.g., images, videos, voice clips, and audio recordings). Quizizz library offers access to a huge collection of ready-made quizzes and lessons spanning several subjects and grades.
You can adapt these quizzes to your teaching needs, edit them the way you want, import questions right into your quizzes and share them with your students. Quizizz provides you with a powerful grading system that generates instantaneous performance reports providing you with a treasure trove of analytic data to use to prepare for remedial interventions and to help you in your lesson planning.
With a single click you can share these reports with parents to keep them in the know of their kids learning progress.
7. Vevox
Vevox is 'a real-time audience engagement app' that can help you uncover knowledge gaps, enhance students participation and boost their attention. Vevox's live polling feature enables you to easily create polls and view audience responses in real-time.
You can use various question types including multiple choice, open text, word cloud, star rating, numeric, image polling and more.
You can download an excel report of all the polling information for later analysis. Participants can access polls by entering a 9-digit session ID in Vevox app on their devices. Other interesting features provided by Vevox include: live quizzes, surveys, Q&A board with 'Like' upvoting, group discussion, moderation, reports, Microsoft integrations, and many more.
8. Slido
Slido is another good audience engagement tool that allows you to engage your students using live polls, Q&A, quizzes, surveys, and word clouds. For instance the Q&A feature allows participants to ask their own questions with the option to pose their questions anonymously thus encouraging shy students to take part in class discussions.
You can also use the Quizzes feature to hold a live quiz or create trivia games and test students knowledge in an interactive way. The Analytics page offers you access to detailed insights on how many students were engaged, number of poll votes, active participants, and many more. Slido is also integrated with a number of tools and platforms including: PowerPoint, Microsoft Teams, Google Slides, Webex, among others.
9. Plickers
Plickers allows you to collect real-time feedback through polls and quizzes. The way it works is simple: 'just give each student a card (a “paper clicker”), and use your Android smartphone or tablet to scan them to do instant checks-for-understanding, exit tickets, and impromptu polls. Best of all, your data is automatically saved, student-by-student, at plickers.com'.
10. Blooket
Blooket is another game-based app that lets you create a wide range of educational games. You can host live games that students can play using a generated ID or assign games as homework for students to play at their own pace.
You can create your own question sets or use ready-made sets created by members of the Blooket community (Blooket lingo refers to games as question sets and I use both terms interchangeably in this review).
Students are not required to register to play the games. However, having a student's account allows students to "track their stats, place in global leaderboard rankings, buy and sell Blooks, and participate in upcoming community-wide events!"
