Good Practice - Case Study

St.Luke’s School

School No: 635

Voting System Trial - Autumn 2003

For this trial St. Luke’s School used the CPS Voting System on loan from Hertfordshire Development Centre, and was supplied with a total of 32 handsets with 2 receivers and the necessary software. The school was interested in evaluating:

1. How easily the learners, who all have Moderate Learning Difficulties, would be able to use the handsets and interact with the presentation software.
2. How the use of the system would help to involve and engage learners and help them contribute to lessons.
3. How useful the data and reports generated by the software were to teachers and other school staff.
4. How easy it would be for staff to familiarise themselves with using the software and hardware, and therefore be able to use it without support.
5. How easy it was to set up and use the hardware.

Lessons using the CPS system were run with different classes of students from Years 9 and 10.

Examples of lessons

Lessons using the system included:

1. A general knowledge quiz using pictures and text for use in a Year 9 basic skills lesson.
2. A discussion-generating activity using pictures of different places and landmarks, to generate debate about whether the place was a tourist attraction or a historic landmark, or both.
3. A comprehension activity delivered to students who had watched a film as part of an English lesson.
4. A multiple-choice mental arithmetic activity for Year 9 students to check understanding from previous lessons.
5. A food survey of likes and dislikes prepared by Year 9 students and delivered to a mix of year groups, as part of a project to create a healthy eating diet

Ease of Use

All the students who tried out the system were able to easily use the handsets and had little difficulty in remembering to point them towards the receiver and press firmly until they could see their votes registered on screen. They also seemed to have no difficulty in using the A and B buttons as Yes / No indicators. Because these particular handsets do not have numbered keys, students were not able to enter numerical answers so we were not able to evaluate how successful activities that require this type of input may have been. This was unfortunate and something we would have liked to have tried.

Success of use of the system in engaging and including all learners in the classroom

It was hoped that by using the system, students who are perhaps less confident and reluctant to contribute and volunteer answers in usual lessons, would be able to anonymously provide answers. In so doing they would be providing the teacher with useful information that might normally be difficult to obtain.

This was certainly the case, with all students taking part willingly submitting their answers. An interesting observation was made during a mental arithmetic activity. At the end of the voting activity the teacher asked each student individually if they would like to see their results displayed on the whiteboard in front of the whole class. He was sensitive to the fact that students might not want this information displayed, but all except 1 student were happy for this to happen, and the majority were subsequently pleased with their results. This might lead to increased confidence and willingness to contribute answers in situations where other students would hear them.

Also, as expected, the novelty value of the CPS system and the fact that this was a new type of activity meant that the students were highly motivated and enthusiastic during the voting lessons. Whether this interest can be maintained across a longer period of time remains to be seen, but provided the system isn’t ‘overused’ then I would imagine the interest would be maintained.

Usefulness of Reports/Data generated by the CPS software

The CPS software allows the user to generate a number of reports and data summarising the students’ answers, percentages of questions answered correctly or incorrectly, answer distribution etc.

Only a small number of the possible reports that can be generated were relevant to the needs of St. Luke’s School, but those that were provided useful and relevant data for recording, assessment and evidence. As the system was used on a trial basis without being scheduled regularly into a program of learning, we did not fully exploit this feature of the software, but if we were to own a system I am sure the data would be used to good effect.

Ease of software familiarisation and use

In any school there are those who are more confident in using ICT resources, and therefore some teachers were able to use the system with less support than others. Because we had the system for a limited time we decided that for the period of evaluation we would offer full support from the schools’ ICT Development Officer to any teacher wanting to use it in a lesson. This way the teacher could get a feel for the benefits / drawbacks of the system without worrying about the technical aspects.

One of the benefits of this particular voting system is that you can either use the built in question templates for generated the questions or you can use PowerPoint. I tried working with both, but found the built-in question templates integrated better with the report generating features, so I opted to use this over PowerPoint. The templates are very simple to use and I was able to create a session involving several questions, including graphics and multimedia components, in a short space of time.

As mentioned previously, there is a large number of reports that can be generated by the software after a voting session has taken place, and this was slightly confusing as most were not relevant to St. Luke’s School’s needs. However, once one has been through them to establish which ones are useful, the others can be ignored.

One other point to note is that the software discourages use across a network. This means that if a voting lesson is prepared in one room it was difficult to run it in another room without moving files about, which was not only inconvenient but also required some technical knowledge. Whilst network is possible with CPS, easier integration would be of benefit.

The delivery options for voting activities are very flexible allowing the teacher considerable control and choice over how they run the activity.

Ease of set up and hardware use

The system uses a USB receiver and the handsets. It is very quick and easy to set up the system but on a few occasions the CPS software was not able to detect the installed hardware, which meant restarting the computer, disconnecting and reconnecting the hardware or running the detect receiver utility from within the software. On the whole, though, the system performed reliably.

Students can see whether their vote has been detected by an onscreen confirmation, and the teacher can disable voting detection until the precise moment he or she wishes. This means that even if the students are pressing away while the teacher is leading into a question, no votes are counted.

Also, students are able to re-vote (until the teacher ends the question) if they change their minds on an answer, and pressing a key out of the range of the available answers (eg key E in a 4 possibility multiple choice) causes no problems as the vote is ignored and an onscreen indication that the vote is invalid is given.

Conclusion

We found this trial to be very successful. The voting system proved to be an excellent resource which could provide real benefits to teaching and learning. The system lent itself well to visual and kinaesthetic learning styles that many of our students have, and provided an engaging and enjoyable way for them to contribute to a lesson, as well as providing the teacher with useful information in the form of the reports which can be generated. We would like to have been able to try out numerical input activities. Also, colour coding of the handset buttons or dedicated Yes/No buttons would have been useful, but as mentioned, the students had no difficulty in using the existing buttons to answer a variety of types of questions.