Plickers

When you need to assess informal or formally this is great for fast results. Once you set up subjects you can reuse for years. Great for classroom control in difficult classes. As all students have to participate every kid is on the horse at for every question. For I class fun questions you can ask the question and then see who got right and wrong for non graded assessments and then peer pressure to hear your neighbor makes it a competition but in nice way. Use at closure of activity for understanding check. It takes a couple of tries to get out and paste from assessment banks into system. But once in you can reuse and call up in a minute or two for use. I select possible question for use during day or week in advance for 6 classes in under 30 minutes. Then I can use on the fly in class as needed and periodic assessments. Good for group work. Put a question for discussion in the test bank and then have the students discuss before answering. You can also see who is faking participation that way. Just wish I could upload whole text banks rather than cut and paste but small price to pay for quality and free program. Mike

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I loved Plickers before the update. It was such an easy use of formative assessment because I could see the student data as I scanned with the answer and student name popping up. Now it just tells me they got it wrong. I like to see in real time the mistakes they are making so I can address them in our discussion about the question. Before the update Plickers had a bar graph that was a fabulous representation for the students to see and it was large enough the kids could see it from anywhere in the room. The graph included now does not visually represent the data for the students or show it large enough they can see it. Now when displayed the questions are huge but the answers are so tiny the students in the back of my room can not see them at all. The students had to move closer to the board and expressed frustration and that they no longer enjoyed Plickers. (So sad because they begged for it before) I created a set of questions on the computer and can not find it anywhere in my library. It was so much easier to manipulate before this recent update. Please fix this so I can go back to using it to glean immediately feedback for my classroom and so the kids will enjoy it again.

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I was excited to try Plickers in my courses after seeing at a workshop, and initially they worked really well. The students enjoyed seeing the results appear immediately, and the results were easy to incorporate into grades. The new update, however, broke what was working so well. The new question format has tiny answers that are difficult to read even right near the screen, the images are cut off when displaying from an iPad (which has no landscape mode), and students can no longer see their card register as scanned (so I miss some of them). To top this off, today the questions were displaying with the correct answer obviously selected (the letter was highlighted). No longer fun or useful - I will sadly put away my printed cards and shelve plans to invest in laminated versions.

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I LOVED plickers! This was such an easy to use formal and informal assessment until everything changed. I was just reading the most recent reviews, and it seems many people feel the same way. Plickers made everything so much easier on the teacher. It was quick and easy. Now, I am struggling to make it work. I am glad I used it last year, during my observation, because it worked well and added points to my observation scores. The next time, only a few days after my observation, I tried to use it, and y’all had changed everything. I haven’t been able to use it with my students since then. I HOPE THAT YOU WILL LISTEN TO ALL THE TEACHERS THAT LOVED PLICKERS! Please take it back to what it was, so all of the struggling teachers out there(myself included) can use it with ease.

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Plickers was great! Until I logged in this school year to discover the format has changed significantly and that some of the functions won’t work without getting a membership. At first attempt it wasn’t very user-friendly and I can’t quite figure out how the new version of Live View works (and I’m fairly tech-savvy). It doesn’t appear to give the same, quick feedback for teachers AND students either. They also changed little things that are mildly annoying. For example, when I printed the class rosters it only gives me the students’ first names (I’m not sure what happens if you have multiple students with the same name). Perhaps I will get used to the basic version, but I definitely won’t be paying. I put too much money into my classroom already.