"Clickers" -- more formally known as Personal Response Devices or TurningPoint ResponseCards, or a Student or Audience Response System when talking about the collective technology -- are hand-held devices that allow audiences and students to participate in presentations or lectures by submitting responses to interactive questions.

Clickers can be used in a variety of ways, including (but certainly not limited to):

• Engage students in class and lecture situations; increase student involvement
• Provide instant feedback for students and instructors
• Ask questions and give quizzes to ensure comprehension
• Collect and analyze data appropriate to the learning situation
• Collect and record students' performance data
• Take attendance

Media Services in the library checks out clickers like any other piece of equipment. All you need is your ID card with a library barcode. Clickers come in sets of 20, and Media Services has six sets of clickers available.

To create or run a PowerPoint presentation with TurningPoint technology, you need to install the software on your computer first.

A set of clickers from Media Services includes the following items:

• Case
• 20 clickers
• RF receiver in electrostatic bag
• Instructions
• Informational cards

To use clickers in a presentation situation, you will also need the following:

• A PC or Macintosh computer with a USB port and Microsoft PowerPoint, and TurningPoint software installed
• A prepared presentation, or the ability to make one "on the fly"
• An LCD projector connected to your computer is not necessary, but is strongly recommended, so that participants can see the presentation you've prepared.

TurningPoint's proprietary presentation software has been installed on the building laptops and Media Services' loaner laptops. You are welcome to borrow a copy of the software from Media Services and install it on your own computer(s) as well. Media Services does not provide technical support for the software or assume responsibility for the invalidation of any warranty.

TurningPoint software is compatible with both Windows and Mac OS X, but information is not cross-compatible. You cannot make a presentation on your own Mac and then take it to a PC to run it, or vice versa.

A .pdf copy of the user manual is installed along with the program.

After you have installed the TurningPoint software and restarted your computer, go to TurningPoint 2006. This will bring you directly into Microsoft PowerPoint and show the TurningPoint toolbar below the formatting toolbar.

As you would with a regular PowerPoint presentation, add slides by choosing "Insert Slide" from the toolbar. The drop-down menu provides a number of different templates, including Yes/No, True/False, 3- to 5-scale, 2- to 10-answer, automatically generated analogies, and word scrambles.

The "Insert Object" drop-down menu allows you to add graphs, graphics, correct answer indicators, countdowns and timers, statistics, and text "bubbles" if they didn't come with the slide template you selected.

The "Display Settings" option, accessible via the icon that looks like a pair of glasses, allows you to set more properties for each slide, including the number of possible answers anyone can provide, the amount of time for each slide, whether a slide auto-advances, whether or not a slide is a demographic slide, and more.

Under the "Tools" drop-down menu, you can find reports that help track things like attendance, the answers that clicker users gave, and whether or not the answers are correct.

The "Participants" drop-down menu allows you to select or create a Participant List, if you know who will be attending your session.

For more information, consult the manual or contact Elizabeth Fields at (610) 921-7207 or efields@alb.edu to set up an appointment.

Each set of clickers includes instructions on how to handle TurningPoint's activation request.

1. When TurningPoint asks you to activate, make sure the USB RF Receiver is unplugged.
2. Go through the TurningPoint activation process and choose "I want to evaluate TurningPoint." Fill in your information and activate over the Web.
3. Close TurningPoint.
4. When you use the TurningPoint receiver on your computer, the activation code inside will override your choice of evaluation mode.

When using clickers, you may have to use the Response Device Wizard to get the computer to recognize the devices. Click the button shaped like a lightning bolt to open the wizard. Choose the settings that describe the clicker setup that you're using. Your computer should remember these settings for subsequent presentations.

Clickers must also be set to the same channel. The default channel for TurningPoint's clickers is 41.

1. Press and release the "GO" button.
2. While the light is flashing red and green, enter the 2 digit channel code (i.e. channel 1 = 01, channel 21 = 21). Use channel 41 to start.
3. After the second digit is entered, Press and release the "GO" button.
4. Press and release the "1/A" button. The light should flash yellow to confirm.

There are 82 possible channels, so if you're using clickers in a classroom and the RF signal is interfering with someone's class next door, one or both of you can change to a different channel.

You can insert this information into your presentation automatically by choosing "ResponseCard RF Channel Slide" from the Insert Slide drop-down menu.

When you run a presentation with interactive slides built in, the TurningPoint Showbar appears in the top right-hand corner. You can toggle the Showbar on and off by pressing F9.

The icons on the Showbar correspond to the function keys across the top row of your keyboard. Hovering over the icon will give a short explanation of its functions.

From the Showbar, you can see who's using their clickers, ask the current question again, show the responses that users have submitted via their clickers, and add a slide "on the fly" -- for those situations in which you realize you have to ask a question that you didn't plan for when you made your presentation.

Now is a good time to give your data a more in-depth look than you could during voting. If you had a simple Yes/No question, you probably saw how many people voted Yes and how many people voted No. But after your class or meeting, you can use TurningPoint's reports to see how long it took people to say yes or no, how many times it took people to find the correct answer, and which people used which clicker to cast which vote.

For more information, consult the manual or contact Elizabeth Fields at (610) 921-7207 or efields@alb.edu to set up an appointment.

Absolutely not. TurningPoint's software and options are much more complex than those presented above. However, we recommend that you start small. Use clickers to check students' understanding of the material, give short quizzes, or take votes at faculty meetings. Add one interactive slide to a handful of regular PowerPoint slides to keep students awake. Have students enter their ID numbers to verify whether they're in class. Read the manual before you go clicking all over creation.

And feel free to contact Elizabeth Fields at (610) 921-7207 or efields@alb.edu to learn more about clickers.