Clicker software review Flow

Flow is an audience response software developed by eInstruction, now part of Turning technologies. Among other things it allows for participation / voting using clickers that are linked to the presenter via wireless communication.

2nd impressions of Flow v2.0.1.6 and Lesson Builder on 10.10

I upgraded to 10.10 and continued testing in early 2015 despite the stated incompatibility of the Device Manager (not Flow) with OSX 10.10. So far the radio receiver works just fine but many other things give me trouble.

Lesson Builder

• questions cannot be duplicated for the quick addition of similar questions
• not enough presets to quickly generate the right questions (e.g. no timer)
• keyboard shortcuts don't work (Cmd+S, Cmd+X,..)
• In the content editor, return sends cursor to beginning of the same line not into the next as expected.
• New questions created are hidden if there are already enough to fill the list. They should be automatically selected.
• It would be handy and faster to also be able to enter the content viewer panel by clicking on it. It currently is only accessible through a small button at the bottom of the window.
• Content windows is always in the foreground. It should behave like all other windows and move to the background if one switches to another application.

Flow

• Window cannot be moved to 2nd screen since probably because it's not natively programmed. That makes displaying the question to the audience using a projector impossible.
• still cannot add a questions directly to a Powerpoint slide which would be the easiest way to present clicker questions to an audience during a lecture
• Flow and especially the Device manager are slow to start. It takes longer to launch Flow than it does a signifanctly bigger software like Photoshop. Occasionally, clickers and the receiver don't correctly connect, esp. if they have been running for a while. Clickers can be switched on but the answers are not received or the answer format does not correspond to the question. I would recommend a complete restart of the quiz and receiver software before you give a clicker class.

Date export

Quiz data can be exported in various format. Excel seemed to me the most useful. It contains both a summary of all questions and data for each questions individually. Generally, very well formatted, a few things should be changed and added. The Detailed grades and Detailed answers tabs should include the question type and question title above the data columns. Informative questions are always graded as zero and highlighted as false. They should just be blank. Numbers are formatted as text, a common problem with exports to excel.

The team is very responsive. I often got a reply with useful suggestions within a day or two.

1st impressions of v2.0.1.6 on OSX 10.9

I started testing in Oct 2014 on an MacBook Pro Retina running OS X.10 (Yosemite). It turns out the software does not yet run on 10.10. So I continued testing on an older MacBook Pro running 10.9.

Installation

• Installation requires restart. What? The only one doing this for ages.
• install locations & related files:
  • Applications/Turning Technologies/Flow: 2 applications: Flow v2.0.1.6, LessonBuilder v1.0
  • ~/Documents/Flow questions
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Flow 2

Results

• no Powerpoint plugin for Mac
• Flow is prone to freezing
• cannot detect CPS Pulse clickers using Flow / Detect devices

Version history

• v2.0 2014 May [1]
• v1.7 2014 Jan [2]

See also

• Clicker in the life sciences (audience response systems)
• Flow software download from Turning