Qwizdom is one of the brands in the market and our choice of voting pads at Loughborough College. Electronic Voting Pads (EVPs) are being used more and more to transform teaching and learning practises within the traditional classroom setting. Also known as ‘Personal Response Systems’, ‘clickers’ and ‘quiz pads’, they work using either radio frequency or infra-red technology which sends a signal to a receiver or USB, attached to a computer. Learners in the class are provided with a handset, enabling them to respond to questions introduced on screen (normally on a PowerPoint slide).
Peerwise is a repository for multiple choice questions that is accessible by all learners. An account needs to be created by a College, but this is a short, simple progress. PeerWise complements existing teaching materials and course organisation, and can help to establish a learning community in your class incorporating collaborative learning and peer tutoring.
Socrative is another example of quizzing software but unlike Qwizdom, this is based online. You can access the software as a teacher or student via a number of different devices including:
- Laptop
- Desktop
- Tablet (e.g iPad, Galaxy Tab)
- Mobile Phone
- ipod Touch
Teachers set up an online classroom, in which they can create quizzes. They then send all link to the students (or ask them to click on the student app if using tablet, mobile phone, iPod). Students can then simply type the classroom number in and once joined, the teacher will start the quiz. The quiz pace is controlled by the teacher and once the final question has been asked, the teacher then closes the quiz.
The table below shows some potential uses of this technology in both Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE). Below this are videos which demonstrate how this technology could be used in teaching and learning.
| Uses in FE | Uses in HE |
|---|---|
| To review and recap learning. | To facilitate revision sessions for exams. |
| To engage students in class. | To support group work and collaboration both in class and outside of class |
| To support comprehension tasks | To produce voting surveys |
| To support self-paced task sheets to track a learners’ progress | To answer self-paced questions on a Journal article |
| To generate individual reports to give to students as ongoing feedback | To generate individual reports to give to students as ongoing feedback |
An introduction to Qwizdom
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