‘Plickers’ is a free Student Response or All-Class Response System (SRS), useful for those without access to one-to-one devices in the classroom. All you need are some downloadable and printable class cards, the Plickers app, and one handheld device. The students hold their cards up based on their answer (A, B, C, D), the teacher scans the cards from anywhere in the classroom using a smartphone, tablet or iPad, and the responses are automatically entered.
You and the class can view a graph of responses if you connect your computer to a projector (without your students seeing who provided which individual response). Teachers can ask multiple choice questions or yes/no questions and can save the results of each quiz or poll in their teacher account.
NEW: Plickers now has hybrid and online mode for using plickers face to face, online (or in both modes at once!). The Plickers question editor allows you to include advanced mathematical and scientific equations. In addition, the ability to include images, Gifs, sound and other multimodal features might add a more gameified feel!
Regular check-ins with your students during instruction aids formative assessment and future planning. Teachers often use thumbs up/down or hands up or fingers to try to gauge understanding or interest but these ‘systems’ can be difficult if not impossible to track. Plickers allows you to save the individual student responses (and you don’t need to ‘give away’ any of your students’ information to do so).
Plickers can even be used in the gym or outdoors (be sure to download the large sized cards if using in large spaces). This youtube video shares how one teacher uses a ‘magnet version of Plickers’ called ‘Plagnets’ in a PHE class.
Many teachers lack access to individual devices needed to use other student response systems (iClickers, Socrative, Menti, Kahoot and others). With Plickers, all you need is an app, one device and printable cards for your students. Some excellent features include (excerpts below from Plickers.com):
2. Individual Student Reports: On the left panel of Scoresheet, you can print individual student reports or save them as a PDF. The first sheet provides an overall class average and lists the 3 most commonly missed questions for you to save for your records, while the remaining pages contain individual student reports including the question and answer choice selected.
More information about features is available on the Zendesk on the Plickers website.
Plickers Quick Start Instructions
convenient way to collect some brief feedback from a group of students. No teacher or student login is needed, though teachers can set up an admin password and can also ‘moderate’ responses so that only those approve ‘go live’. Among other features, responses can be embedded in a blog, shared via social networks and translated at the touch of a button through google translate (click the ‘export’ button to find this option).
