Smart Device Clickers

Abstract

In the traditional instructional paradigm, faculty members act like actors on a stage. They memorize their speech and deliver it to the audience, many times with very little to no interaction at all with the audience. On the other hand, in the student-centered learning paradigm, faculty members act like coaches interacting full time with their team. This chapter is based on a study conducted at a Brazilian Federal University. The study depicts the distance between science production and teaching, and reports on experiences using smart phone clickers to track and analyze students' content acquisition. The objective is to improve the interactive quality of teaching and learning, thus promoting steps to shift towards a student-centered instructional paradigm. Although smartphones were used in this study, with wearable technologies continuing to grow, other wearables such as smart glasses and smart watches could be used instead.