Tag Archives: clicker grades

assessment, grades, Teaching, troubleshooting, tutorial

Missing Clicker Grade? Check this:

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I have written about this before, but the clicker looks different, so I thought it was worth going over again.

There are two different ways that a student can use a clicker to send information to the instructor.  The first is the normal use of the clicker in the classroom… the poll response.  When a student uses this, the screen looks like this,

And when the student answers, they get a confirmation that the answer was received, and as long as the poll was given some grade, they may also get points in their blackboard grade book.

The second thing that students can send with their clickers are Messages.  The student enters into this mode by pressing the wrench button on the clicker,

and then sending the message

The student also gets a happy confirmation that this has been sent.. and messages can only be sent when the polls are open. But there are no grades or points associated with this activity, and if they believe they have answered a poll, they will get a zero.

As the instructor, you can check to see if this is happening in your class by opening the TurningPoint 8 software, go to the Manage tab, select a session file and click on Reports.

If you, like me get this error – ignore it

just click ok

and use the pulldown to select the report type Session Log

 

If you see entries that look like:

“Doe, John (8D5678) sent a message to the presenter: D”

You have students that think they are answering polls, but are really sending messages.  If you see things like:

“Doe, John (8D5678) sent a message to the presenter: Can you talk more about Mitosis?”

You have students who are sending messages, thinking you will see them and respond.

If you would like to see messages during class – you can.

You can click on the button as seen above that looks like a comic dialog bubble..  and that brings up a chat area that looks like this:

I hope this helps, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to either TLT @ tlt@stonybrook.edu or Turning Technologies at support@turningtechnologies.com

 

assessment, tutorial

Send Message mode will not get you points in class

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Before you even answer a poll in class… how many icons are on your screen?  Does it look like this?

SM

It shouldn’t. This is the Send Message mode. Theoretically it is for asking the instructor questions during polling – but no one uses it really, and the messages you send go into a weird report that they never really have a reason to look at, so they won’t be seen.

It should look like this:

reg

 

To get out of Send Message mode… you must hit that back arrow in the lower left corner.

grades, Teaching

Turningpoint Clicker grading issue

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Clickers are used to gain student involvement in even the largest classrooms. At Stony Brook University, a lot of our instructors will assign points to the students  whether they get the question right or not. Sometimes the same amount of points, sometimes not – and sometimes those grades make it to the grade book and sometimes, they only measure whether the students were responsive enough to merit attendance for the day.

So what does it mean if the results manager shows a 0 in the situation where the instructor gives points whether the students got the answers wrong or not? First, make sure that the instructor marked something as correct.  If most students have a grade of some sort – but one or two students have zeros across the board, this isn’t likely the issue. You can double check that something was marked as correct, by going to the Turningpoint Manage tab selecting a session, and clicking Edit Session.

example of the edit session window

example of the edit session window

In the above picture you can see that answer 1 is marked correct and that both incorrect and correct answers would get a value of 1. So this doesn’t account for the 0 in the results manager or grade book.

The next thing that could be wrong, could be that the student unwittingly was in “Send Message” mode, rather than just in the regular polling mode. To find out if this is the case, go to Manage tab, then while having a session highlighted, click the Reports button.

 

where to find the Session Log report

where to find the Session Log report

Then for the type of report, choose “Session Log.”  Here is where Turningpoint keeps messages that were sent to you when polls were open.  You can see below, someone did in fact send “Hi.”

Session Log from Turningpoint

Session Log from Turningpoint

However, you can also see that two students were sending in what they thought were answers to the polls.  If these students have zeros – you now know why.