Barry Dahl dot com

I’ve used Poll Everywhere a couple of times, both as an experiment to see how well it works and also, most recently, to try to make a point. In addition to yesterday’s post titled Things I Don’t Believe (see slides 2 & 3), I also used Poll Everywhere with the poll embedded in a PowerPoint slide. I was using the Turning Point clickers with the audience of about 315 educators when about halfway through the presentation I asked how many of them had cell phones. At least 250 hands went up in the auditorium.
I asked them to take out their cell phones if they had a text messaging service with their phone. Then the poll question appeared on the screen.

Q: Which is closer to your position on students having cell phones in schools?

A1: Ban them! They are a complete distraction and detract from learning.

A2: Use them! They are powerful devices that can be used for learning.

Suffice it to say that I found the irony quite enjoyable. Teachers using their cell phones to answer a poll question saying that cell phones should not be allowed in school. I was using the free version of Poll Everywhere so this is actually a very small subset (23 responses) of the people in the room. I was surprised by the nearly equal division of the responses as I expected a higher percentage to say Ban Them! I erred in not getting all of them to respond to the question using the other clickers. Now I really want to know what all 315 of them think about this question.

Filed under: Computing | Tagged: Cellphones, K12, PollEverywhere |