Liven up your didactic lectures with audience response systems
I recently caught up with a friend of mine who is a resident in New York City. While we chatted, he took out his cell phone to show me pictures of friends and family. A picture of one of his fellow residents dozing off during noon conference really caught my attention.
Issues about resident fatigue aside (just this once!), noon conferences can be boring. When battling against resident fatigue and stress, educators need to keep their lectures interactive to keep residents’ attention. In the November issue of Residency Program Alert, I described how lecturers can use audience response systems (ARS) to energize their presentations.
An ARS is a modern day version of a show of hands. Using an electronic keypad, the audience (residents) can answer questions posed by the speaker. A computer tabulates the results, and you can display them for the audience to see.
With an ARS, speakers can ask questions throughout a lecture to see if residents understand the material and determine which topics need more attention. ARSs can be fun, too. Have residents play trivia style games during lectures to test their knowledge.
Here are a few links to ARS vendors:
Option Technologies Interactive
Audience Response Systems, Inc.
A simple Google search for audience response system will turn up tons of results as well.
Does anyone use ARSs during their didactics? What are some of the ways you use them? Leave a comment below!
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Residency Program Alert
Residency Program Alert is the only monthly resource that brings you best practices and tools from the most well-respected experts working in the field.
RPA has written 15 posts.
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My name is Alice Tavernier and I work for PowerVote as marketing assistant.
Our company is specialised in audience response system. We are a French company and have been on the UK market for 2 years now. We do work quite a lot in the education market and have customers like Corby Business Academy or Queen’s University in Belfast.
While reading your article “Liven up your didactic lectures with audience response systems”, I noticed that you quote some voting systems to inform your readers. Can I take the liberty to ask you to integrate us in your article?
Our website is http://www.powervote.co.uk should you want to get more information about us.
Thank you in advance.
Audience Response Systems incorporates multimedia elements such as sound, graphics, animation, photos, and movies into the show. Audience Response Systems can include Web links, and a variety of files created in other programs. http://www.audience-response-systems.info/
I’ve been looking into audience response systems and have come across http://www.audience-response.ca/ – they seem to offer a very useful service. I really think that audience response is going to play a big part in education in the future, as it keeps students engaged through a medium that they understand.
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