Engaging the audience

"Making the Most of Your First-Year" is one of the workshops that new students attend during Orientation in the summer.  This presentation is designed to introduce new students to campus services available at UCSB and to give tips and suggestion on how to have a successful first-year at the university.

As you can imagine EVERYONE (i.e. departments, student organziations, services, etc.) wants a piece of the action when it comes to communicating with new students the opportunities and services their particular office provides.  Since there is not enough time in a one or two-day program to have every campus service individually present to the students, my office has created the "Making the Most" presentation as one solution to ensurethat new students are made aware of the services available to them once they arrive on campus.

Yesterday, in a summer de-breifing meeting, the team wase discussing what went well and what could be improved on in this presentation.  A theme that continues to emerge after every summer is that the presentation needs to be more interactive.  We know that students better retain information when they can interface with the presentation, thus participating in constructivist learning about their new campus community.  Over the years we have toyed around with the idea of breaking into small groups, which was quickly discarded since the typical audience size is around 300 students.  We've thought about using iClickers to have the students participate in real time polling to questions or concerns pertinent to first-year students, but this idea also doesn't seem feesible given the additional tasks of handing out the device, training students on how to use it, and collecting at the end of the presentation.

One of the team members, Miles Ashlock, suggested for next summer that we look into the online site http://www.polleverywhere.com/.  Much like the iClicker, it allows for real time response to poll questions but instead of using the iClicker, students use their personal cell phones to respond to questions.  According to the website, student information is not stored so there should be no worry about getting spam or text message advertisements.  Also student responses are anonymous and cannot be linked to the student.  At this point polleverywhere might be one viable multimedia solution to our dilemma of making this particular presentation more interactive, increase audience participation, encouarge question asking, and engage the students.  I'm truly looking forward to seeing how it might be used in our 2011 program.