It Takes Two to Tango - Part 2

The math department, I have to talk to them about their philosophy, because they've got something going there. Fortune favors the prepared. This is, I don't know, in chemistry this is a saying, fortune favors the prepared mind. Kekule imagined a snake in a dream and suddenly he knew what benzine looked like. So you can do slides on the fly, and if you've learned, through this conference we've seen a little bit of slides on the fly. If I suddenly wanted to ask a question, like I often do, I could just go up there, hit a key and type it in and boom. I'm not that fast of a typist, but it's going to really hurt me if I have to do every single slide on the fly. So unlike my old lecture style where I could do anything, sort of hey, I want to change my notes, I want to go to page 78 right now instead of going to 72, then I'm going to have problems. I can't be quite as moving around because PowerPoint, unlike overheads, it's hard to just pick the one off the bottom and deal from the bottom. So you have to be a little bit more prepared. You can't jump around as much, so the more prepared you are the better. Now it's becoming easier and easier to just get content, so if somebody wants to give you content-oriented slides--publishers are starting to do it. Even if it's not in TurningPoint--Control C, Control V works on my computer very nicely for copying and pasting content. I'm not proud, I don't even have to use a Thomson textbook-- they're not here, I hope-- I don't even have to use a Thomson textbook to use their material in my Prentice-Hall class. It's chemistry, okay, so content is getting easier and easier. But if you come in there looking like some totally unprepared schmo that's trying to do this thing with the clickers and you don't have a clue, you're going to have some issues, right? So you have to at least have put in a little bit of lead time. So I heard some questions yesterday about how much extra time is it. It's really not that much in the preparing my slides thing. It's in that first day, that first impression is the first one, right? Come in, I've got to know how it works and it probably won't work exactly how I thought it was going to in my office, so you've got to have a little bit of willingness to fail. And then I often hear, we're still using this. Alright, here we go. So, you reap what you sow. You've got to invest the time. If I say on day one clickers are really important and then I move on and do chemistry for the next 50 minutes, we're going to have some problems. So I really need to get them to spend the time in class to get them to work. I had one student here who couldn't log in at the beginning. We had somebody helping out. And so I would probably say, hey, you logged in? Can you help out your neighbor with logging in, it looked like you knew what you were doing. And it looks like there's some questions, so we have to get that, especially in a class of 500. You really want to get this thing to work because you want to eliminate all the how do I, this didn't, I don't know if this--you want to get rid of those. So just some examples. My syllabus is my contract. It's not really my contract by university policy, but if the students feel like it's a contract, so I want to lay it all out there. So on day one when I'm showing the syllabus, you need a book, you need a lab manual, you need some lab glasses, this is the old version of the clicker, but you need a clicker. So then we're going to use these things because right here, laid out, I'm telling you that we're going to use these clickers in the syllabus. Right here on page one, attendance will also help you. I don't take attendance in a big class, but I could with a clicker, but I don't. So it's going to help you participate in class, please bring your clicker. Sorry, response pad, I'll change that, bring your response pad to every class. You are responsible for being sure that it is functioning, and you are responsible for making sure that your batteries are not dead. If the calculator's batteries died, no one seems to think that's the instructor's problem. But when the clicker battery dies, well the instructor really needs to make sure something's going on. Well, you know, your batteries are dead. Did you check that [audience laughter]? It's $3.50 at the Alamo, go over there, they're button batteries. Well here, I have one here in my pocket to show you what it looks like. So, that's not my issue with a calculator, why is it my issue with this thing? So I try to sort of--they're adults. They're students, but they're adults, put the responsibility a little bit on them. And when it's laid out in the syllabus, I get way fewer of the whiny. So we have these in-class quizzes. Candy is dandy, but clicker is quicker. I can't really bribe my students with candy, but I can bribe them with fun. I'm going to show them how much fun they can have. So they're all freshmen, often. They've all probably been to a bar, maybe, maybe not, so they all played bar trivia. So on day one, since I'm trying to get you to buy into using these clickers which I think are educationally important, I'm going to fool you into learning on day one. And so we're going to do bar trivia on day one. So I think most of you have seen this screen. If you haven't seen this screen, that's good for you, you're not getting out much, that's good [audience laughter]. I have two little kids, so I haven't seen this screen in a long time, but it used to be that this was a fairly fun game. And I know NTN got bought out and I hope they're not here, either, but this count down game is a very common bar game. And most of my students have played. And so they're like, Oh clickers, oh bar trivia, oh count down. So the way the game plays is you use you're clicker, except you have this big cumbersome remote control unit because no bar wants you to slip it in your pocket. And so it's this big unit and you basically have five choices and you pick one, so let's play bar trivia. I'm at ISU, so we're going to have to deal with ISU things. Okay, so nickname for Illinois State, go ahead, that's a (UNCLEAR AUDIO) best. Come on, F9, alright. So things will go away, hopefully, if I didn't hit the wrong key. I hit the wrong key, I hit 9 instead of F9. So we would start to get some clues to get it away. The Chief, I'm going to have to change that now, too, so everybody thinks we're Illinois. So we've got these things going away, so Redbirds and then a little bit about why we're not called the Teachers any more. Oh, more bar trivia, more bar trivia. And this is in TurningPoint, it's just that I'm not good at animating in PowerPoint, but it's easy enough to do. Alright, Illinois State was founded in. And so, just like bar trivia, you can't really see what's going on. Alright, so we have an 1857 room, and so in 2007 we turned 150. And so, it doesn't mean anything today, but in a bar it would say "Way to go rock star participant 7" [audience laughter] or whatever. This is one of the drawbacks because I'm doing this on day one and I don't have a participant list that has their names. They don't know who they are and since it's on auto, it doesn't even give you by the code on the back of your clicker so that you can know, like, hey, I'm awesome. So, "Way to go participant 7, you were the fastest overall responder", it coupled both those points together. Pretty good for a non-ISU audience, because I would expect the ISU audience better know how old we are because 150 is everywhere on campus, and I hope you know the Redbirds. So this is something that now we think this is fun and cool, and it's like bar trivia, and I'm doing bar trivia in chem class. Not bad! Okay, so then I guess maybe we shouldn't do (UNCLEAR AUDIO) these days, but it's the economy, stupid. [unclear audio], so it's the economy stupid. We operate in a points economy. That's where I live. Students, somebody was saying oh, students want to learn. No, they want to get the answers, we heard that last night, they want the answers. Tell, don't ask, they say. We say ask, don't tell. We operate in a points economy, it's all about points, right? How many points is that worth? What's this? What's that? So I have to give you points for playing. I pay you to play. Now I pay you nothing but you, we also discussed that we'll give you candy but if you do a good job we'll give you the good candy payoff system for student workers. It's a ridiculously small thing, but it works. I don't penalize for not playing, I reward for playing. But it's this complicated ridiculous formula that's a pain in the neck to code in Excel, like once I get the formula in Excel it's done. Okay, so we're going to do 100 to 200 clicker questions a semester. The best 80% count, I don't know, I made that up. Then of that, you get 60% for just hitting any button and 40% for getting the right button. And so what that means is any given question is worth absolutely nothing, so just click. I don't want you thinking about oh, I don't want to get this wrong. That's not my goal. My goal is not I don't want to get this wrong, it's just click. So when you're just clicking, and this best 80% means you can miss a class and I don't have to worry about giving you an excused absence. Or my clicker didn't work today. That's okay, no worries. Your clicker didn't work today, it's going to be in that 20% that goes away, so don't worry about it. And so if you really want to, give me a slip of paper and I'll throw it in a file and then at the end of the semester, if you're within one point of the next grade, I'll look at it. But then we just don't have to worry about all the 500 people times 1% problems, you get issues. This makes all those go away. It's a little bit of a pain to set up Excel to do it but it's not that hard. So anything is worth nothing. So then the winning isn't everything, right? So now we've already established, just play baby. So not just win baby, just play baby. Am I logged in? I ask that question before every class. Just for fun, so the students are logged in. I asked you if you were red-green color blind without asking you that. You came into the room, there was a slide on the screen. If you're doing it on a campus that adopts, that person might have six different channels that they're doing, or five different channels that their clicker is on. So I want to make sure they've gotten on the right channel so that they're getting credit, and they can tell that they're doing it. So fun examples I might do, are you color blind. This one's always fun, because if you haven't, you can't play. I love this one. I go in and I'm like look, 100% say yes. That's because those of you who said no--because we haven't yet found a good way to have everybody give us their clicker numbers, we're working on that--if you said no, you didn't even get to click in. So register your clicker today, it's on WebCT. It's not that hard, click on the button, send me an e-mail. So this is sort of my fun way to guilt them into playing, because it should be 100% in my class. But here we have some people that can say no because this is on auto.