In January, during the Technology Tuesday presentation at Salisbury Middle School, I shared an exciting interactive learning system, Turning Point. (Turning Point Presentation) Turning Point transforms a typical lecture into a powerful interactive presentation.

As a teacher or presenter you may ask questions, poll the audience, or play team games via hand-held response cards. As the teacher you can quickly assess the class’s collective understanding and evaluate individual comprehension through the data provided in the software.

I have used the response cards in a variety of ways. I have used them to assess literal comprehension of a story or to review basic vocabulary definitions. These can be done with a simple multiple choice template.

Although this is helpful, I have found the clickers to be more powerful for springboarding classroom discussions. By asking inferential and evaluative questions using these keypads, I am able to engage more students in the discussions. Using these for anticipation guides is highly effective. These types of questions are evaluated using a Likert scale (1-5) for the responses.

In addition, I have had students utilize this software for their individual presentations.

The main selling point of this program is its ease of integration with PowerPoint. Literally, if you can use PowerPoint, you can learn how to use the software in two minutes or less.

Please contact me if you would like to try this system. The system requires specific software, a receiver and response cards as well as a projection system for your computer. I have the software and response cards in my room.