This Spring my school purchased classroom sets of SMART Response XE clickers. I was honored to be trusted to experiment with one of the sets and incorporate it in into my formative assessment. John Hattie researched 138 influences on student learning and found that formative assessment was the third most effective of all of them. SMART Response XE clickers give teachers and students formative assessment in a format that students are comfortable with while producing data teachers can use with ease.
The Equipment
An actual SMART Board is not necessary to use this tool. As long as you have a projector, you can use it. A classroom set has 32 clickers. The closest mobile device I can compare it to is a Blackberry.
Each clicker talks to your computer through a receiver that attaches through a USB port.
Set-Up
To use the clickers and have them track student data you have a little set-up to do. If you want to just get a feel of how the class as a whole is understanding material, you can use anonymous mode which requires no set-up.
To create a class you have to assign each student a number and enter it. I used the student numbers they use to access their school e-mail and lunch account. They use this unique number in other contexts in the building.
Assessment
The SMART Response clickers are great for multiple choice summative assessment such as exit tickets. All assessments are created in the SMART Notebook program. You start the class and the assessment. Students join the class:
You can project the question or questions using either the SMART Notebook program, Google Docs or Microsoft Word.
If you are interested in having students take actual multiple choice tests using the clicker they can. You can create the assessment in SMART Notebook and print a copy for each student. Students would then answer on their clickers and you could review the results as they answer the questions.
I like to go over the answers to summative assessments with the students after they are complete. SMART Notebook generates pie charts of how the class answered each question.
The clicker has a full QWERTY keyboard and calculator functions. You can use them for short answer questions and math problems. You could ask for adjectives to describe something. The software will produce word clouds for short answer questions so you can see which answers were used the most and least.
To conclude
To be sure, there are many tools on the Internet that do what SMART Response XE clickers do. Letsgeddit and Socrative are two good examples. I especially like the way Socrative gives you student data for each assessment. The reasons you want to work with the clickers are 1) they show the class instantly how the whole class did on a given question – this sparks great class discussion about why answers are right and wrong and 2) they cross the digital divide in non 1-to-1 classrooms. I hate relying on student smart phones for Letsgeddit, Socrative or TodaysMeet and having a few students not have them. School provided clickers put all students on a level playing field.
A tool that incorporates technology into assessment and looks similar to the devices that dominate students’ lives is an asset for any teacher. For schools not quite ready to take the 1-to-1 plunge Smart Response XE clickers can serve as a nice intermediate step to incorporate technology into assessment.
I owe a big thank you to Kristen Swanson, Ed.D, whose feedback for this post was invaluable.
Tom Mullaney 
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