Event technology is commonly associated with corporate meetings or fund-raising events, but it is also a tool that can be adapted to suit schools and colleges. In an educational environment, audience response is just as important – students need to be engaged and feel the empowerment of contributing to a lesson in order to increase knowledge retention. They can then learn from each other as well as from their teacher or professor. Audience response systems save time, improve accuracy of data collection and allows for greater data evaluation.

Such systems can be put to a variety of uses in the classroom or lecture theatre. The accumulation of test scores, homework and even administrative tasks (registering attendance for example) are all made easy and become less time consuming, especially when dealing with large groups of students.

Students will be encouraged to act and think independently of their peers when electronically voting or commenting as they are guaranteed anonymity – they will not feel the social pressures of conformity which occur with more traditional methods such as raising your hand. Through the use of audience response systems, they will be more focussed and more likely to remember what they have learned as lessons become more fun and engaging.

Event technology means that teachers and professors can create a dialogue with large groups of students that could only really be achieved in one-to-one sessions or seminars amongst smaller numbers. The importance of opening up a dialogue with students cannot be underestimated – it is a far more effective teaching method than the teacher talking and the student simply listening.

With the popularity of social media amongst the younger generations, most students will be acclimatised to having information shared instantly in real time. They will have a particularly high regard and awareness of interactivity that social media grants them. There is also the fact that they are given their own voice – commenting, voting in polls, “liking” and “disliking”. They can share ideas not just with the teacher but with themselves. Audience response enables students to ask questions in a lecture where before they may not have been able to speak at all.

Related posts:

1. Text Messaging