Understanding Classroom Interactions Among Diverse, Connected Classroom Technologies

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Together with three major corporate partners, Texas Instruments, Palm, and Nokia, this project is investigating the impact on everyday classroom teaching and learning of a network of inexpensive hand-held devices equipped with interactive computational media. The effects of this massive classroom connectivity are important to understand in order to inform iterative improvement of i) technologies and classroom practices that support learning and ii) the design of teacher development and support structures. The PI and colleagues are working with teachers in ordinary grade 8-12 classrooms equipped with school-standard graphing calculators and newer devices wirelessly networked to each other and to a teacher's workstation. Three areas of impact are under exploration: (1) Assessment: regular, principled diagnoses of students' responses to carefully designed probes and problems submitted to the teacher for analysis and action. (2) Learning: new student activity structures involving (a) teacher-student and student-student challenges, and (b) student contributions to shared and publicly displayed constructs. (3) Teaching: teacher classroom management support for distributing and collecting student work, viewing and annotating student screens, and managing the flow of information in the connected classroom.