Page 13 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

1) VARY YOUR PACE AND FORMS OF PRESENTATION
While being able to predict exactly what they’ll experience in a class may give students some level of comfort, your goal really should be to keep them guessing — because that translates to engagement. One way to accomplish that is to mix short- segment lectures (10 or 15 minutes long) — sometimes at the beginning or sometimes at the end of class — with calling up small groups of students to work together on problems at the whiteboard or interactive panel in front of the class while you request feedback from the audience. Or you might ask those individuals at the displays to share examples and solutions from their homework assignments and walk the rest of the class through their thinking. This approach has several benefits: It keeps everyone on their toes; forces those students “tucked away” in the back rows to participate too; provides clues about what’s confusing to the class; and trains students not in the “starring role” at the moment to listen to the other students and not just the teacher.
Tip! When posing questions, practice waiting for students’ response. Depending on the questions’ complexity, that might be between three to five seconds or as long as 30 seconds. Give students enough time to think before kicking into gear. Another idea: Mix up the questioning by issuing students cards with colors they can hold up. Red means “I’m not going to the
board today”; yellow means “I may go to the board today”; and green means “I’ll definitely go to the board.” Then award points depending on which color students choose. Red gets zero points for the class; green gets the maximum number of points.
2) EMBRACE GROUP PROBLEM-SOLVING
If you have the kind of classroom setup that facilitates group work, exploit it. Divide the room into four or five teams and set them to solving real-world challenges in a timed fashion. Start simple for warm-up and build to more complicated problems. Present the current problem on a master display so students don’t lose sight of what they’re doing. Then your job will be to walk around the room: Ask leading questions, especially if it appears the energy is flagging; address confusion; and pull in the quiet ones by asking them what they think in front of the other group members, in case they need some fresh ideas. Then have the groups broadcast the results to the main screen from their own devices and walk the rest of the class through the outcome.
Tip! At the end of the presentations, be sure to have students save the work shown on the big displays and post it to the learning management system with descriptive file names so everybody can pull up the image later when they’re reviewing for tests.
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
Interactive flat panels (IFPs) are becoming the active learning classroom workhorse. You can certainly inspire on-the-move learning without them, but it’s just plain harder to accomplish the same outcomes. As Jon Grodem, Senior Director of Strategy & Planning, Optoma, pointed out, the IFP “has the potential to be the classroom equivalent of the mobile phones students can’t do without, but many times larger.” Here are four trends shaping IFP decision-making:
IFPs are making the transition from 1080 pixels to 4K.
Higher resolutions translate to greater readability as well as the capacity “to put more information on the screen that’s usable at any particular moment,” he explained. “For example, you can have a video window, slide show and document window open showing multiple things, all at once.”
Displays are getting bigger. The typical size of IFPs is growing from 65 inches on the diagonal to 75 inches. Grodem said, “We’ve heard from multiple sources in the market that the majority of installs in the higher education space will be transitioning to 75-inch displays.” That larger size better accommodates multiple touchpoints, enabling several students to interact with the content on the display at the same time.
Embedded software is making the displays easier to use. No longer does the classroom require a set-top box to take the signals of computing devices and transmit what’s showing up on those screens to the IFP for display. Now, the instructor can walk into the room, turn on the display, have it hook to the WiFi, and then choose the input icon to allow any laptop, tablet or smartphone in the room to share content.
IFPs are becoming more flexible. Although traditional
displays are static or fixed devices, Optoma’s IFPs can be
transported from one classroom to the next on carts, as well as
mounted on the wall, depending on usage needs.
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