Gauging Lecture Effectiveness in Real Time

My programming students are often in a computer lab when I lecture to them. When I lecture, I wonder how much of what I am saying is getting through. Some years back I created an application, QuickQuiz, to use during my lectures to send a question out to all the kids and collect their answers. I can give them as much time to answer as I want (usually about 20 seconds). A timer counts down on each screen. When the answers come in they show on my "Quiz Giver" window, and I have a pretty good idea of how effective my teaching has been.

The program has an integrated chat, and the first time I used this and let them chat with each other while I lectured it was eye opening. I got to learn more about them than I would with only verbal communication (because some were shy, and bandwidth is limited when only one person can speak at once). And I learned where my lecturing was weak, because I'd see "I'm lost," or "What does he mean by 'X'?" I've improved as a teacher because of the instant feedback of their chat messages, and the quiz answers.

I thought of QuickQuiz today while watching a Howard Rheingold video blog, Attention 102: The view from the front of the classroom, in which Howard explores the concept of attention in a classroom (college, in his case), where students have laptops and can look things up while he talks, take notes in a wiki, do things unrelated to the class, or chat with each other. I hope he talks more about what his students chat about during lectures, and about how he captures and keeps their interest while willingly competing with everything on the Internet.

You can run QuickQuiz yourself. It's free.