One fear of the use of technology in the classroom is the thought of rows of students staring at computer screens, not interacting with the teacher or with each other. While computers do need to be available to every student and will no doubt become an important part of the classroom experience, their function in the classroom will be to increase connection and learning, not remove interaction.
The technology should free up the teacher and the students to make the most out of classtime. This means that instead of classroom time being spent with long lectures, that students may or may not attend, and may or may not be awake during, where students copy copius amounts of notes from a blackboard, and where professors speak non-stop for the entire class length, that instead the teacher could do what they went into teaching for: provide inspiration to their students, share their love and excitement about the material with the class, and communicating in a multitude of ways with each individual student in order to translate the knowledge. The inspiration, excitement and human connection with individual students will never be able to be substituted by a computer, and great teachers can help students learn in extraordinary ways. In addition, technology in the classroom can help students connect with each other, for small group and project based work, creating team work, and allowing students to assist each other with their various strengths and problem areas. This is the strength of the classroom: where the teacher can connect with the students and the students can help each other- not 45 minutes of note taking. Long lectures and reading are great prep for a class, but not for classtime itself. This is the idea behind the technology enhanced classroom.
This is particularly necessary for those certain classes, for example mathematics and the mathematics based sciences, where no amount of reading or listening to long lectures will help you understand it. You just have to do it. Enter MIT and their Technology Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL).
TEAL was created initially for MIT's freshman physics course which was a large lecture taught to 300 students: "Despite great lecturers, attendance at MIT's freshman physics course dropped to 40% by the end of the term, with a 10% failure rate... Traditional lectures, although excellent for many purposes, do not convey concepts well because of their passive nature." The creators of TEAL reformatted the teaching of freshman physics at MIT with a new mix of pedagogy, technology, and classroom design. TEAL classrooms include 13 round tables each seating 9 students with instructors at the center of the class. Whiteboards and eight video projectors surround the room. Groups are formed by mixing students of varying levels of knowledge to "facilitate peer instruction" Instructors deliver short 20-minute lectures with discussion questions, visualizations, and pencil-and-paper exercises. Students use animated simulations designed to help them visualize concepts, and carry out experiments in groups during class. "Instructors periodically ask questions, which students discuss and answer through an electronic polling system with handheld voting keypads. Instructors no longer lecture from a fixed location, but walk around with a wireless microphone talking to students about their work, assessing their understanding, facilitating interaction, and promoting better learning...The teaching methods used in the TEAL classroom produced about twice the average normalized learning gains for low-, intermediate-, and high-scoring students when compared to traditional instruction. " The New York Times reported: "Already, attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent." (At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard)
TEAL provides active vs. passive learning, one-on-one interactions with the professor and students, students engaged in group projects, and students voting on questions so that the professor has immediate feedback on how well the class is understanding the material. Check out a video of TEAL in action: http://web.mit.edu/edtech/videos/mit-Teal1-220k-ref.mov
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