High-tech tools enhance teaching

Social computing, personal broadcasting, cell phones, educational gaming, augmented reality and enhanced visualization and context-aware environments and devices are among the emerging technologies with uses in teaching and learning.

Such technologies and their potential impact both in and out of the classroom over the next five years were identified in the recently released Horizon Report, a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative.

Among the new teaching tools used by UD faculty to engage class participation, measure student attitudes and assess student learning are personal response systems, known as clickers.

Tom DiLorenzo, chairperson and professor of psychology, says the use of clickers works well in large-enrollment classes where some students may not get a good handle on the material with which they are presented.

“When you ask students if they understand or don’t understand something, they often do not say anything, so there is no way to really assess what they have learned or not learned,” DiLorenzo says. “The clickers provide feedback and are a great way to determine which materials the students understand and which concepts they are not getting. Now, I can tailor my time to cover things they don’t understand about the material.”

Helene Intraub, professor of psychology, says she hopes that the use of clickers encourages the more passive students in her classes to think about the material being discussed.

Students using clickers can input an answer to a teacher’s or classmate’s question and get immediate feedback. Because all students participate—albeit electronically—in discussions, the clickers force them to better prepare for class, DiLorenzo says.

In another classroom innovation at UD, James Hoffman and Robert Simons, professors of psychology, have combined problem-based learning and technology to develop an “ultimate classroom” for active learning of statistics.

Their “Measurement and Statistics” course uses Fathom, a user-friendly software package for visualizing statistical data. The ultimate classroom, designed by IT-User Services, allows teachers to set up an electronic bulletin board at each table, as well as a homework bulletin board, where everybody can see the assignment questions.

“What we particularly realized is that statistics is not really a class that engages students the way a class in something like art history might,” Hoffman says. “Rather than having students think that someone is going to tell them the answer, they learn they can discover the answer themselves.”

With its emphasis on communication, the ultimate classroom uses the traditional problem-based learning strategy of dividing the class into small groups at multiple workstations. Each workstation is equipped with a remote control keyboard connected to a ceiling-mounted projector that transmits data to an off-site server. Each workstation’s work is displayed on a series of screens around the room.