Educator Highlight

Every day we hear about new and innovative ways our customers are integrating response technology into their classrooms. These stories were so good we just couldn’t keep them to ourselves. That's why we developed our "Educator Highlights."

Do you have any suggestions for our next Educator Highlight or would you like to be featured for your innovative use of response technology? Contact us.

Kathleen Klein
Assistant Professor of Occupational Therapy
Richard Stockton College of New Jersey

Kathleen Klein has served as Assistant Professor of Occupational Therapy at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey for the past 9 years. Kathleen also serves as the Occupational Therapy Program's Course Coordinator for Continuing Education Activities under the Department of Continuing Studies for Health Sciences and Human Services (Try fitting all that on a business card). Both in class as well as in her professional presentations, Kathleen has found the use of student response systems to be a vital part of the learning process.

Kathleen was first introduced to Turning Technologies' student response systems in 2006. "I was looking for more feedback and participation from my students. As my class sizes grew, I recognized that the amount of student participation decreased. As a result,I wasn't fully able to gauge student comprehension and understanding," explained Kathleen. Her use started in the classroom, where she focused on conceptual topic understanding, but then expanded its use to her continuing education professional presentations. In these environments, Kathleen uses the technology to gather audience information such as demographics, prior knowledge and level of experience. She finds the technology useful in administering Mastery Quizzes for awarding continuing education units.

A large focus of Kathleen's teaching structure revolves around building student collaborative learning environments, a concept very similar to Peer Instruction. In essence, the practice involves creating a more engaging learning environment that encourages discussion among peers facilitated with the TurningPoint response system. Since implementing this structure, Kathleen has compiled preliminary data suggesting that the use of student response and student collaborative learning has improved student preparedness and engagement with course concepts. The use of the TurningPoint response system is noted to facilitate more open discussion among students and between students and teacher. "I've observed improvement in student understanding and concept recognition since I've been using TurningPoint," said Kathleen. Being able to quickly pull reports created in TurningPoint, Kathleen is able to immediately assess problem areas and try alternative approaches to ensure mastery.

Having experienced the power of student response systems in traditional classrooms, Kathleen has recently taken an interest in the possibilities of its applications in online learning environments. In December of 2009, Kathleen wrote an article entitled "Promoting Collaborative Social Learning Communities with Student Response Systems" which was published in the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. In the article, Kathleen talks about the importance of internet-connected devices to the success of the online learning environment. "One of the primary advantages of SRS use with mobile devices is allowing students to participate from any location without sacrificing aggregated data collections and report generation" (Klein, 2009). Turning's mobile polling solution, ResponseWare is a tool Kathleen feels will help transform e-learning environments. "Being able to take the kind of experience created in the classroom with ResponseCards and transfer that to the online environment with ResponseWare is empowering," exclaimed Kathleen. Kathleen goes on to explain that the use of student response systems and well constructed social constructivist pedagogical practices can create the ideal social learning community, one that encourages conversation among remote students resulting in a more engaging knowledge construction process.

Kathleen is a strong supporter of student response system use in the classroom, not only in the traditional sense but also in distance learning environments. Their use has been an integral part to Kathleen achieving student collaborative learning in her classrooms. "I always say anything's possible, you just have to have the right tool for the job. For me, TurningPoint was just that tool."

If you would like to read Kathleen's article it in its entirety, please click here.

Klein, Kathleen (2009). Promoting Collaborative Social Learning Communities with Student Response Systems. Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, Vol. 5, No. 4 December 2009. Retrieved from http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no4/klein_1209.htm