My 30 Seconds of Fame

Last fall, a reporter from my local ABC affiliate was interested in doing a story on clickers.  He ended up interviewing me and capturing some footage in my linear algebra class.  I recorded the local news for the next few days, but I never saw the story.  A week later, a student in the class who is from Nashville said that her mother (or perhaps her grandmother) had seen the story on one of the late night news broadcasts.  So it did indeed air; I just missed it.  Flash-forward to last month, when Turning Technologies put the news story online as part of a collection of video testimonials about teaching with clickers.  I finally got to see the story, and now you can, too.  I wasn’t kidding about my 30 seconds of fame–the story is about that long.

Even though this piece was incredibly short, the reporter highlighted a few important points about using clickers, points that aren’t always addressed in news items on clickers.  The tag line for the story was “Teachers engage students with new device,” which hit the engagement aspect of using clickers I like to emphasize.  Also, the sound bite from my interview that they used was the one focusing on agile teaching, which is another important piece of teaching with clickers.

Image: “Zenith Television Set, 1977” by Flickr user Roadsitepictures / Creative Commons licensed