Literacy with ICT

Time-to-Adoption Horizon: One Year or Less The unprecedented evolution of mobiles continues to generate great interest. The idea of a single portable device that can make phone calls, take pictures, record audio and video, store data, music, and movies, and interact with the Internet — all of it — has become so interwoven into our lifestyles that it is now surprising to learn that someone does not carry one. As new devices continue to enter the market, new features and new capabilities are appearing at an accelerated pace. One recent feature — the ability to run third-party applications — represents a fundamental change in the way we regard mobiles and opens the door to myriad uses for education, entertainment, productivity, and social interaction.

What Is a CRS? A classroom response system (sometimes called a personal response system, student response system, or audience response system) is a set of hardware and software that facilitates teaching activities such as the following. A teacher poses a multiple-choice question to his or her students via an overhead or computer projector, perhaps using PowerPoint to do so. Each student submits his or her answer to the question using a handheld transmitter (often called a “clicker”) that beams an infrared or radio-frequency signal to a receiver attached to the teacher’s computer. Software on the teacher’s computer collects the students’ answers and produces a histogram showing how many students chose each of the answer choices.

Clickers, or student response systems, are a technology used to promote active learning. Most research on the benefits of using clickers in the classroom has shown that students become engaged and enjoy using them.

For this reason, I conducted a study that compared learning outcomes resulting from the use of clickers versus another active learning method—class discussion. Even though both techniques employ active learning, would using clickers increase learning outcomes more than another active learning approach? Two key features distinguish clicker use: Clickers provide a mechanism for students to participate anonymously. Clickers integrate a "game approach" that may engage students more than traditional class discussion. The study also investigated students' perceptions of their learning using clickers versus classroom discussion

Twitter is increasingly being used by journalists to make contacts and track news events, but the Twitter user-interface (UI) itself is pretty limited making it difficult to track conversations. Fortunately its open API structure and the ability to subscribe to various types of RSS feeds from Twitter means there are a number of ways to track a ‘buzz’ around an event or specific conversations.