Innovation Profile 031

Technology can make students' problems visible

When a teacher sets students to work on a problem, it can be very difficult to monitor their progress by looking over their shoulders. It is disruptive to students' thinking to stop them, to enquire if they have problems.

Technological approaches to improve this situation are surprisingly flexible, using an interactive whiteboard and computers or slates for each student and the teacher.

An increasing range of tools and software are enabling more work to be done on computers by individual students and groups. If the classroom is also equipped with tools such as SynchronEyes™ classroom control software from SMART Technologies Inc. (http://www.smarttech.com/products/synchroneyes) and a SMART Board interactive whiteboard, the teacher is able to intervene much more effectively.

SynchronEyes software enables the teacher to monitor all the students' screens. It is possible to check whether several students are finding similar difficulties. If the difficulties that students encounter are very individual or are only troubling part of the class, the technology allows the teacher to identify who is struggling the most, or to know which students to bring together to discuss a common difficulty. The teacher can then intervene appropriately.

To discuss a problem encountered by a group, the work of one group member can be displayed on the whiteboard for all to see and discuss. If this is then worked on together, it is possible to transfer this next development of the solution back to students' own screens, for them to continue individually.

The whiteboard of course may also have been used to introduce the problem at the start and perhaps to take the first steps in its solution together as a class. Time would then have been saved, by transferring this starting point to the students' computers and copying errors would have been eliminated.

Teachers using this kind of equipment will quickly realise how it is helping them to be more efficient in the use of their time in class and more effective when working with groups, and in their interventions.

But how do we help school/college principals and policy makers to fully appreciate these educational and learning improvements?

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If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org

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