Visit this morning to a nearby college.
Very jealous. Their library is naturally much smaller, but they've put into place some marvellous software which is what we'd gone to see demonstrated. It's used in computer suites for teaching and enables you to fix all the computers on the room on what the teacher/trainer's doing. Of course you could somewhat negatively say that it would stop students surfing the web or reading email instead of concentrating on the matter in hand, or more positively view it as helping students to focus on the teaching point before then allowing them to have their hands on time.
In addition the teaching machine could view any individual student machine to help with problems (or, presumably, to spot 'abuse') and it was even possible to block particular web sites and/or send a text message to the relevant screen saying to desist.
We're considering introducing some such software here as some of my colleagues doing training sessions have felt that it would be more than helpful in keeping attention focussed where it's supposed to be.
I'm somewhat in two minds. If the students are disengaged enough to want to be reading their email or websurfing, how much is that down to our teaching? And even if our teaching is scintillating, shouldn't the students be able to decide what they want to do? (It's their money!)
But a couple of things about it did appeal: it can be quite hard to see web pages projected at the front when you're sitting at the back, and although we're also considering repeater screens to ameliorate this, it would be great to be able to see clearly because the presenter's screen was on your own monitor.
The other thought I had was that it would be possible to show the rest of the class if a student had a particularly good example of something or a good answer or some such. With their permission of course. Or, indeed, to respond to a query by letting them work through their particular question with everyone else watching if that was useful.
It remains to be seen whether we'll spend the money... but the visit was well worth making if only for the cakes they provided!
1 comment:
I gave this some consideration at MyOldPlace - there was a definate appeal to retaining the focus of students on software courses.
Can't recall why we didn't implement it, but some of the reasons you gave probably came into it - and the cost.
The hidden cost of systems like this is the time spent trying to fix it when it goes wrong.
In my experience there are usually two types of glitches with most systems. There's the frequent glitch that'll be easy to fix, but irritating nevertheless. And probably not major enough to justify finding the time to implement a permanent fix.
Or there's the infrequent glitch that's equally easy to fix, only it happens so rarely that you can never remember how you solved it last time. And once it's fixed you forget about it, until the next time.
As time goes by I am coming more in favour of using less systems and technology, where possible.
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