iClicker (integration with Brightspace)
What is iClicker?
iClicker incorperates technology into a learning environment. Each student has an iClicker and uses it to respond to questions during class time. Results are captured and displayed immediately.
What are the benefits to using iClicker in your Brightspace Course?
iClicker Cloud Roster & Grade Sync (RGS) allows you to quickly and easily pull your Brightspace roster into iClicker Cloud and send your iClicker Cloud grades directly to your Brightspace gradebook.
Benefits of this integration include:
- Quick and easy setup
- Ability to pull your Brightspace roster into your iClicker Cloud course
- Assistance in getting your students ready to use iClicker before classes start
- No additional linking steps for students
Support
- For instructor support, please email dmp@torontomu.ca.
- For student support, please email clickerhelp@torontomu.ca.
iClicker Student Use
All students must create an iClicker Student account to ensure their grades sync to your iClicker gradebook.
Information for New Instructors
By answering questions and seeing the results right away, students will know how they are doing and where they are with their peers. Using iClickers also allows shy students to participate when normally they will not raise their hands. iClicker can be used either anonymously or for marking.
If any of the conditions below are true in your class, then you may want to consider using clickers for your course:
- Students are falling asleep during your lecture.
- You see students staring at you with blank eyes.
- You have larger class size which makes it harder for you to engage students.
- You know that students are listening and want to contribute, but are shy to participate.
Before you consider using clickers, ask yourself the following questions:
- What is the learning objective of your course or particular week/chapter/topic in your course?
- What ways or methods can you use to achieve that learning objective? Will technology help? If yes, what and how?
- Will clicker help your students learn better?
- And finally, will you be able to set aside additional time to be familiar with the technology?
Answering those questions will help you to avoid a common pitfall of selecting the technology first, just for the sake of the technology, and then try to fit it into your course.
There are two main challenges:
- Learning curve – As with adopting any technology in your course for the first time, you may spend considerable amount of time in learning and familiarizing with the technology. Proper training and asking questions to the DMP (opens in new window) will help you ease the process, but ultimately, the majority of the effort will be from the instructor her/himself. Therefore, you need to acknowledge the amount of work you need to invest at this stage.
- Class preparation – In order to use clickers effectively, you need to prepare the questions to be asked in class. The questions you prepare will correspond to the purpose of why you use clickers, such as to take attendance, to find out whether students understand a particular concept you have just explained, to do a small quiz, etc.
Clickers enable instructors to find out whether students understand a particular concept at a certain moment during lecture. Instructors can ask students a multiple-choice question, and have students respond. The answers can be obtained immediately and be used as a guide for whether to move forward with the lecture, or to spend more time on the topic.
- Promote student’s active and reflective learning: iClickers may be handy in acquiring students’ opinion, especially those related to sensitive, personal information. It works well when the clickers are used in anonymous mode. This activity engages students to participate actively and to reflect upon their opinions in comparison to others.
- Improve student engagement by being active and collaborative: Clickers can be used for peer training, a method that allows students to discuss and collaborate in resolving problems, answering questions, or explaining to each other. This method promotes active and collaborative learning. Instructors prompt questions and students discuss small groups about the problem.
- Taking attendance: Instructors can use iClickers to take class attendance. It can increase students’ motivation to attend, and reduces paperwork and class administration time.
Getting Started
For support using iClicker Classic, please email dmp@torontomu.ca.
Software Download
Sign up to iClicker Cloud (external link, opens in new window) to begin using the software.
Download the iClicker Cloud software (external link, opens in new window) from the website onto your own laptop or desktop. Launch the iClicker Cloud software and login using your personal account credentials previously set up.
To access your iClicker Cloud account online, you can login by going to iclicker.com (external link, opens in new window) .
Course Details
Before running sessions in class, review your iClicker Cloud settings to ensure they meet the specific needs of your course. This ranges from:
- inputting information that will help your students add your course in the iClicker Student app.
- deciding if/how you will be using an LMS with iClicker Cloud.
Settings are customized on a course-by-course basis, so if you are running multiple courses in iClicker Cloud, modify the settings for each individual course.
Learn how to Register and Get Started with your iClicker Cloud Account. (external link)
Attendance
Unlike the polling and quizzing modules, iClicker Cloud’s Attendance module is run entirely from the iClicker Cloud Instructor website and can be set up to automatically run during each class period.
iClicker Cloud’s Attendance module allows you to take attendance using optional geolocation technology that recognizes if students are within range of your classroom when they check-in. However, in a remote teaching setting, this is function is not advised.
Before running an attendance session, ensure you have customized your attendance settings–including the optional geolocation information. For more information about the attendance module, click below:
- Attendance Settings (external link, opens in new window)
- Run an Attendance Session in iClicker Cloud (external link, opens in new window)
- View and Manage Attendance Data (external link, opens in new window)
- How does iClicker Cloud’s Attendance geolocation functionality maintain students’ privacy? (external link, opens in new window)
Polling and Quizzes
Unlike the Attendance module, Polling and Quizzing sessions can only be run from the iClicker Cloud desktop software. In general, running iClicker Cloud sessions is very similar to running iClicker Classic sessions–you can run a session over any presentation software, grade on the fly, ask anonymous questions, and more.
However, there are a few differences regarding question types, polling toolbars, and grading. One notable enhancement is that iClicker Cloud can send students screen shots and results from the questions asked during class to use as a study guide.
Click below for step-by-step guides and more helpful information about running sessions in iClicker Cloud:
If some students from your roster did not sync, the dialog will appear as a summary of successful student syncs and a section describing action that you or your students may need to take to successfully sync the rest of your class.
The fix for sync errors is for students to update their iClicker profile (external link) to use the email address that matches their Brightspace account.
If the student has created multiple accounts and needs assistance, please ask them to contact iClicker Support (external link) .
iClicker Cloud grade information can be accessed from either the iClicker Cloud Desktop Software or the online gradebook (external link) , via the iClicker Cloud instructor website.
Note: Changes to previously-synced scores that you make in Brightspace will be overwritten the next time iClicker Cloud is synced. We recommend making score changes directly in iClicker Cloud, then sync to Brightspace to ensure that the two gradebooks are consistent with each other.