Interactivity in lectures

Turning Point Cloud

Hello,
Just to update you:-
I used TP Cloud for the first time today to a group of ~120 Year 4 medical students for a 45 minute interactive lecture session in the MTC lecture theatre. I ran it from my laptop and it seemed to work well. The students seemed happy to use their devices to respond to the questions (mainly MCQs with best of 5 response and with a linked image) and this avoided the issues with the ‘clickers’ we’ve used before. They all connected via the rwpoll.com website rather than the app – the connection was stable throughout.
Minor issue was the lag on my presentation and the polling opening and closing, but this may well reflect a dated laptop and a presentation heavy with clinical images and also ~50 questions so lots of background data running. It took nearly 5 minutes to background load all the slides / reset the session. This didn’t necessarily interfere with the running of the session.
I opted to run the session in such a way that only the response buttons were loaded to each students device (rather than the whole question including images). The responses were anonymised but I see each student had a unique device ID and I may use this to allow students to see how they scored overall (it doesn’t look like this is available for the students on their devices).
I liked the option to respond with short answers / numbers which I also used for one of the questions, but couldn’t seem to find a way to display the student percentages for this (it just presented a rank of the top 5-6 responses, but only the report contained the number of responses / %) – this may be something I’ll pick up as I play with it more.
I like the report feature which I’m exploring at the moment, and this will be helpful for me to review the questions to see where they struggled, and also may be a way in which I can feedback students results to them (if they note their device ID).
Overall I’m a convert. The beauty of running it off my laptop was that I could rapidly switch to another ‘backup’ non TP version I had loaded on the lecture theatre desktop if the system froze / laptop or program became non-responsive, which appeals to a ‘belt and braces’ type person like me, and saves that awkward ‘we’re having technical issues’ lull in a lecture.
Happy to advocate this to anyone considering using it – much simpler and issue free than I had anticipated it being.
Kind regards
Jamie

Dr Jamie Roebuck
Senior Teaching Fellow | Warwick Medical School | University of Warwick