Community reviews for Plickers

My students and I both enjoyed using plickers. I’m fortunate to be in a one to one iPad school, all my students and I have iPads. So plickers was very easy for me to use. I think it's great that plickers is accessible to almost everyone, all you need is the plicker cards and an Ipad, Iphone, or Android device. I think plickers overall is a good teaching tool, it can be used as a homework check, daily drill, review tool, or a formative assessment. My students really loved using plickers, I got a lot of ohs, ahs, and “How are you doing that Ms.Allen?!” from students when a check mark would appear next to their names. The students liked the instant gratification of knowing the answer to a question, as well as seeing how the class did as a whole. One feature that may be interesting for plickers to offer is having an electronic option for the code cards, such as a picture students can hold up on their ipads. It just takes some extra time to pass out the plicker cards, having them be electronic would just be a time saver. Overall it’s a great tool and I would highly suggest it to anyone!

I liked that this was viewed as a competition for the students in my class. It motivated the students to figure out the correct answer and share it with me. Sometimes I have the same students who participate all the time and a few that sit back and wait for other students to answer the question. When I introduced this product to the class, they were excited and it encouraged them all to want to participate. I like that it saves the results on the teachers phone and shows the percentage of students that answered the questions correctly as well as what the students selected as the incorrect response. This product can be used to motivate the students and engage them in the lesson. It can also be used as an assessment to see which students understand the topic. It allows teachers to identify what needs to be retaught to certain students because it shows that teacher which students got the answer incorrect. It can be used to help teacher reflect on what went well in the lesson and what can be done differently the next time that lesson is taught to the class.

Plickers is definitely more for formative than summative assessment. I think that it is better used in a spontaneous questioning environment rather than in a review of questions previously asked. The visual aspect of vote tallying adds excitement to the classroom and the coded cards hedge against students “cheating off of their neighbor.” Note that if copying is a concern, the cards should be cut into squares rather than rectangles which give directional clues to A-C or B-D choices. Stylistically, I need to work on question retreival timing with my iPhone because students were putting up answers to the next question and my phone was updating answers for the previous question as I fumbled to find the next question. In my AP CS application (as well as most AP multiple choice situations), there are 5 answers A-E which causes some issue with Plickers. My students cleverly used the back of the coded card for the E response. There are many embedded resources provided by the College Board and private publishing companies which have 5 answers. It was a bit cumbersome copying questions into Plickers and realigning to 4 answers, but the library question feature makes it easier to save and use over time. I’m still in search of a technology tool that makes the process of converting existing .pdf and other format files into easily managed interactive questions. Perhaps this is a problem to be tackled by the College Board on behalf of teachers everywhere.

I have found Plickers to be very successful in the classroom. My students continue to ask, "When are we using the Plickers again?" The students enjoy that it is an interactive activity, and the app allows for a spark of friendly competition within the classroom . The use of Plickers in the first ten minutes of class gets my students engaged immediately in the material, but it also has helped me receive better feedback than a normal style warm-up. Sometimes the app takes awhile to load, and it will stay frozen on the Live View page. But for most of times that I have used it, it has been able to load all of my questions that were a part of the queue for the class. The website/app were very easy to learn and user friendly from the start. I was very excited to be able to add a class roster, instead of typing all names individually to create classes. However, it is also very easy to adjust classes at any time. The use of folders in the library section has also helped me be able to stay very organized with the two different classes and the different questions that I am creating on the site. I would definitely recommend the use of Plickers in any classroom, and at any level. Your students will be amazed by the technology of the app, and be left wanting to use it more.

This is a wonderful tool that can be used K-12. If student names are entered into the class, teachers can gather data during the lesson, but also after the lesson to more closely analyze learning. The power of data driven decision making in the classroom can be leveraged using this tool. Oftentimes teachers are discouraged with technology integration because of the requirement of devices. Plickers takes the access barrier out of the equation.

This is a positive app replacement if you have limited tech resources in your classroom. I liked the instant feedback I received about what my students retained from my lesson. The interface and finding your questions in the "lesson plan" section was a little tedious. Overall, it was a very positive experience.

I love that you only need one device. It is such a quick easy way to collect data on multiple choice and true/false questions. Everyone can be engaged in the review process.

I love Plicker as an informative assessment tool. I am able to use the results to redirect my instruction if necessary and identify students in need of more direct instruction or intervention. The students really like the immediacy of the results. They get excited when their scores improve. I like that students have individual "codes." But when students get stuck, they just look at their classmates' answers and try to match the results. So I can't always tell when they "get it."

I believe this tool is truly special because it provides a low-tech version of a service that is typically only available in 1-to-1 classroom environments. In its execution it delivers a speedy, lag free experience that [almost] instantaneously delivers assessment data to the computer which allows it to be visualized for students instantly. It's biggest limitation is philosophical, namely that it restricts the educator to multiple choice questions. In addition, I found difficulty adding images to questions in a seamless manner. Overall this tool is excellent for resource-deprived environments and can be a big win for teachers and students in low income schools.

A great free tool. While set up may take a little effort, class creation was very easy with a quick export from our SMS. You can copy and paste questions & answers in from a website, .pdf, .doc, etc. Didn't take me more than a half an hour on average to populate a teacher's classes, create a dozen or so questions, and assign them. Card printing was simple. Make sure to look for the app under "iPhone" in the app store, but it works fine on an iPad. It would be nice to be able to aggregate scores, though. Right now, the reports are available per question.