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sites.tufts.edu > Teaching at Tufts > Educational Technologies > Clickers & Other “Classroom Response Systems (CRS)” > Clicker Alternatives
What is It?
Adobe Connect, Spark Webconferencing, offers two features that can be well used as free web-based alternatives to physical clickers.
These alternative tools are recommended for those who use Classroom Response Systems casually without commitment to using them for grading. They do not provide rich-text formatting for questions, setup is required in advance of class, and require students have access to a laptop or smartphone or web-enabled mobile device (e.g., iPod Touch) in the classroom. Instructors can use it to gather student responses anonymously using guest access or ask students to use Tufts login credentials to identify their responses. It is recommended that you survey your students and their ownership of devices on the first day of your class.
You can create as many poll questions & chat rooms as you want in a Adobe Connect meeting room for your course.
To get started:
- Create a meeting room on Adobe Connect for your course in advance of your class. See the instructions on how to create a meeting room (pdf).
- For students who would like to use their smartphone or web-enabled mobile device, direct them to download an Adobe Connect Mobile App from this website for their choice of platform. Note that using a laptop browser will give students optimal experiences.
In-Class Polling using the Poll Pods (Realtime Multiple-Choice polling)
- display/undisplay polls
- create more than one polls
- single/multiple-answer supported
- bar graph display by percentage and/or vote count
See more instructions about using Poll Pods, click here.
Open-Ended Responses using the Chat Pods (Realtime Chat)
- create more than one chat box
- display/undisplay chat boxes
- clear chat records
- increase text size
- email chat history to instructor
See more instructions about using Chat Pods, click here.
Where Do I Get Support?
This site is a work in progress.
We would very much like to hear from you about any changes or additional content you would like to see here.
Please email your thoughts to us at firstname.lastname@example.org.