Learning in class with a smartphone

Learning in class with a smartphone  

Today’s students expect everything to be an experience, including class. Studies have shown that attention rates plummet - up to 80% - after the first 10 minutes of traditional classes. It is therefore recommended to regularly switch between teaching activities to maintain elevated student attention rates.

Captivating students, a teacher’s greatest challenge

Wooclap offers an interactive online platform meant to increase student participation in class. Teachers can choose from more than a dozen different features to interact with students, from multiple choice questions and polls to word clouds, matchings, fill in the blanks, brainstormings, and more.

Interaction is quick and effective:

1. The teacher creates questions

2. Students answer by SMS or the internet

3. Results are displayed in real-time

Features are developed in close collaboration with the Wooclap users, like the university of Paris Dauphine, the ENSAM, the ENA, the University of Strasbourg, and the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.

Wooclap also integrates with various platforms and software

• Powerpoint, Keynote, Pdf, Google slides : integrating questions in between slides.

• Excel : Export data to Excel.

• Moodle : Transfer of questionnaires from one platform to the other, Wooclap integration as a Moodle activity, and synchronisation of data between the two platforms.

The Moodle plug-in

• Prerequisite : Wooclap’s Moodle plug-in requires Moodle v3.2 or more recent versions.

• Introduction : Wooclap’s Moodle integration is used as a Moodle activity, simply called “Wooclap”, which is added to the teacher’s list of available activities. It allows the user to create content on Wooclap, directly from Moodle.

                 Wooclap and Moodle meet to simplify the learning process

Students participate online and are identified through the Moodle authentication (they are automatically redirected to the Moodle login when connecting to Wooclap). They therefore do not have to create a Wooclap account.

Once the event is finished, a score (out of 100) and an additional information regarding the degree of completion ("incomplete", "failed" or "passed") are sent to Moodle. This information can be found on the Moodle course under “Grades” and can be used to grant conditional access to further activities, if this option is activated on Moodle.

Wooclap user case: Class at Paris Sud university’s faculty of pharmacy

Devices: 

• The teacher: The teacher used a PowerPoint presentation containing Wooclap questions.

• The students: The students answered using their smartphone, tablet, or computer to connect to the presentation online or by text message.

The class started with a word cloud: students were asked to describe today’s average student in a single word. The more an answer was sent in, the larger it appeared in the word cloud.

Students then had to answer the next question with a numerical value: “How long after the start of a traditional class will there be a visible drop on attention rates?” (spoiler alert: 10 minutes). First, all the answers were displayed on the screen.

The teacher then decided to display the most frequent answers, before discussing some statistics (average, minimal and maximal value, etc.). This type of question has a couple of benefits; first, since there are no answers to choose from, the students aren’t influenced before answering. Secondly, the results are easily displayed and interpreted.

For the third question, students had to point to the part of an image where they believed the amygdala was located. The red dots on the image below indicate the various answers students sent in.

Finally, the class ended with a short and rapid quiz to stimulate participation. In the end, the 5 best respondents were displayed on screen.