I wanted to learn more about iclickers and their application for youth development professionals. In my previous job with the University of Wisconsin Extension, iclickers were purchased for the various educational programs that were offered. I was not able to use them for any of my trainings before I left, so I wanted to see how they were being used by other professionals and come up with a couple of ideas as to how I could use them in my future work. Iclickers are used to make lectures or classrooms more interactive. Some educators reported using them to keep the attention of students and I see this as a great use of technology in education. I have facilitated training sessions for young people and at times the use of iclickers to ask a question that reinforces the lesson or point I want to make would draw the kids into the message, and reiterate the point. Within youth development programs it is also important to continually be evaluating your works effectiveness. The use of iclickers to create evaluation tools that assess the trainings you are conducting would be an immediate means of evaluating in order to make improvements if necessary. Extension educators’ work with both youth and adults and iclickers seem like an easy tool no matter who your audience is.
The website explains that they are compatible with the following online learning tools: iclickers
• Blackboard
• Blackboard Enterprise (Campus Edition and Vista)(formerly WebCT)
• ANGEL
• Moodle
• Desire2Learn
• Sakai
