A TurningPoint Guidebook for Educators

Evan Golub
(egolub@acm.org)
Department of Computer Science
Human-Computer Interaction Lab
University of Maryland

A guidebook for faculty planning on, or interested in, using Turning Technology student response devices in their class. Includes some tips and tricks for getting started and examples of polling options provided by the TurningPoint plug-in. TurningPoint AnyWhere, ResponseCard AnyWhere, and report generation are also discussed. A free PDF version of this guidebook can be downloaded from Lulu Enterprises Inc. A printed and bound version of this guidebook can be bought from Lulu Enterprises Inc. or from Amazon.com

Table of Contents

Chapter I: So you want to use TurningPoint and clickers?
  Section 1: Technology Requirements. 
  Section 2: Defining your goals.
  Section 3: Updating your syllabus.
  Section 4: Preparing for, and adapting to, glitches.
  Section 5: Academic integrity.



Chapter II: Checking your gear, their clickers.
  Section 1: Checking that your computer is properly configured for authoring.
  Section 2: Checking that your computer is properly configured for live RF polling.
  Section 3: Checking that your computer is properly configured for RWW polling.
  Section 4: Having your students set and use their hardware and/or software clickers.
  Section 5: Preparing to work with your data.
  Section 6: Tips for working at home (without a receiver and/or without clickers).



Chapter III: Creating some basic slides.
  Section 1: Yes/No/Abstain.
  Section 2: Likert Scale slides and Multiple Choice slides.
  Section 3: Inserting slides on the fly.
  Section 4: Marking an answer as the correct one.



Chapter IV: Slides that allow multiple votes.
  Section 1: Allowing multiple votes.
  Section 2: Multiple votes with repeats allowed.
  Section 3: Ranking options.


 
Chapter V: Comparisons, branches, demographics, and multi-day sessions.
  Section 1: Comparing multiple polls.
  Section 2: Conditional branching.
  Section 3: Demographic-based voting displays.
  Section 4: Multi-day session use.



Chapter VI: Dial sessions, ice-breakers, and fast fingers.
  Section 1: Dial sessions.
  Section 2: Ice Breaker slides.
  Section 3: Fastest Responders slides.



Chapter VII: Anonymous sessions and slides.
  Section 1: Anonymous sessions.
  Section 2: Anonymous slides.



Chapter VIII: Polling AnyWhere.
  Section 1: TurningPoint AnyWhere questions and polling.
  Section 2: TurningPoint AnyWhere reports.
  Section 3: ReponseCard AnyWhere.



Chapter IX: Extracting TurningPoint data to spreadsheet reports.
  Section 1: Results by question.
  Section 2: Participant results.
  Section 3: Results by participant.
  Section 4: Attendance.
  Section 5: Statistics.