Workshop this morning on a new electronic voting system that one of the centers in the uni (the one with the strange hospital dummies and operating theater and the like) has just bought into. This one allows up to 110 students at a time to participate and unlike the one at the day-long staff conference I attended a few weeks back, is portable. Which means you could book it and take it to whatever class you were teaching in. Certainly beats my colored card into a cocked hat.

This was a top end system (the top end system?) and could do all sorts of clever things such as not only voting on ABCD answers and the like, but also could cope with text message responses so you could, for example, have students suggesting search terms for databases (bit more useful perhaps than the example we had of what was our favorite tv program). Or you could tell them that if they wanted feedback on all their responses, they could text their email address. All the answers were stored in a database that you could review later, but of course were also displayed - if you wanted - on the screen in natty bar/pie charts or whatever. Or even combining two questions to produce X-Y scatter plots.

I'm really really going to have to develop some uses for this! (And I wasn't the only one, two other library colleagues were there getting equally inspired). It certainly seems like an interesting way of engaging the students and getting some instant feedback without necessarily putting them on the spot. If they liked the cards, I can see them loving this - 'specially if it's well designed round the teaching rather than just done for the sake of it.