CLICK IT OR STICK IT: THE COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF CLASSROOM RESPONSE SYSTEMS

Technology seems to have become the buzzword in education. Overhead transparencies are giving way to digital projectors and stand-alone lectures have been replaced with a multi-media blitz of sound bites and video clips. PowerPoint presentations have seemingly become a staple of the modern classroom. There is no longer a question of whether technology should be used in education; it is now a question of how it should be used. The question now has become, how should technology be used. Is a Power Point lecture really all that different from a lecture using overhead transparencies? There\u27s an old adage that gets to the core of the technological problem in today\u27s classroom, ... teach a man to fish . Teachers are delivering content using technology, but not enough teachers are teaching with technology. Technology is not in the students\u27 hands, at least in the classroom. Educators are still using old models of question response, even with this new technology. ... any question is of no benefit to the learners and teacher unless the learner processes the question and participates in the learning activity (Ward, 2003). This paper will show that using CPS systems, technology can not only be placed directly in the hands of students, but has also been shown to improve attentiveness and content retention as well. These results demonstrate that the application of APF in the lecture theater has been of significant use in the students\u27 learning process; both increasing the mean pass rate of individuals exposed to it and reducing the variability between the achievements of different students (Paulis and Massen, 1998)