Understanding the PRS Session Bar

When you run a PRS Session, a floating yellow bar appears. This bar contains controls for managing your questions, seeing how many students are joining the session, and a variety of other options you can switch to on-the-fly.

  1. These two blue buttons allow you to minimize certain parts of the toolbar. The upward arrow will minimize the yellow part, while the arrow point left will minimize almost all of the entire bar into a tiny box.
  2. The Go(Green arrow) and Stop(Red box) buttons for the current question. By default, the question response timer should not automatically start when you move on to the next question. You can press the green arrow to start and pause the question (on a second click), or the red button to end the question.
  3. This is the timer for the current question. When you start the question, the time allotted will begin to decrease - however, you can add time to the question by clicking the green plus sign to the right, or subtract time with the red minus sign to the left.
  4. This number shows the total number of students who have answered the question. This number will increase as more students answer the question, as long as the question has been started. You should compare this number to the total number of students enrolled in the session (9).
  5. These are four buttons for changing question modes:
    1. Impromptu Mode - This mode is used to quickly insert a question into your class on-the-fly.
    2. Lesson Mode - This button allows you to change to Lesson mode, where you can choose to run a different lesson.
    3. ExamView Mode - ? This mode is still experimental and is not recommended at this time.
    4. Add a new question - You can add a new question into your PowerPoint PRS session from here, however, the question and answers will be visible to your audience (including which one is the right answer). Useful for surveying the class on-the-fly.
  6. Buttons for other functions (left to right:)
    1. Pick a student - You can pick a single logged-in student from your class to answer a question. Easier to use in smaller classes, maybe too invasive and time consuming for use in larger classes.
    2. Charts - Charts will be grayed out if no question has been answered yet. It is used to see a chart of the responses gathered (usually a bar graph of the number of responses for each answer choice, with the right answer mapped in green).
    3. Options - Here you can change some options on-the-fly during the PRS session. Some such options are: Showing a chart after a question is complete, showing the timer, the ability to auto-start the next question, etc.
    4. Help - This links you to the help file for the Interwrite Response software.
  7. Click this red circle with an X to stop and end the PRS session. This will save all the PRS data for the session.
  8. Just above the yellow bar are displayed session details: The class name, type of session, question number, and question status (started or not started) can all be found here.
  9. The number in the yellow bar represents the number of students currently joined to the live session via PRS clickers.