Entries Tagged with “sympodium”
Describe your approach to facilitating student learning in smart classrooms.
In terms of using the technology in ENS 280, the 500 student classroom, for the more traditional aspects of the lecture what I would do is—and let me briefly describe the setup of that room, of ENS 280, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it. The way it’s set up is that there are two projection boards where the PowerPoint slides could go on, on either side of the front of the auditorium. And then in the middle is another board where I could use the overhead projector to project whatever I wanted to write on that overhead.
And, the way I use the [technology in ENS 280] to its advantage is that in the PowerPoint slides what I would do is I would show PowerPoint slides of pre-made slides with key concepts and I would use the Smart Sympodium, which is a pen that allows me to write over these PowerPoint slides and I would highlight key points and write key concepts, [and] make sure that the students understand what the key concepts are in each of the slides.
And instead of moving on to the next slide—because I think the danger in using PowerPoint is that a lot of times speakers go a little too fast for the audience when they use PowerPoint—so instead of immediately going to the next PowerPoint slide, what I would do is I would walk over to the overhead projector and write down other key concepts, that I didn’t have the space to write down on the PowerPoint, and that allows the students to catch up in writing down their notes, and also to feel, to give them a little breather in having the time to process all the information. Because a lot of times in a chemistry lecture, the information that’s being given out is very dense and it needs time for the students to be able to process that, and so that’s the approach that I’ve been using, that I felt has been helpful for the students.
— Hong-Chang Liang, Chemistry
Describe your approach to facilitating student learning in smart classrooms (continued).
PowerPoint is really in a lot of ways, in addition to Blackboard, the backbone of the course. So, PowerPoint is sort of the in-class backbone and what I do with it is incorporate some text to get across some of the content that I’m teaching, but I’ve also tried to include more multimedia elements. I’ve tried to paste in figures and diagrams from the textbook and build that bridge for the students between the textbook and what’s going on in lecture, so that if there’s a particular useful figure from the textbook, I’ll tell them what page it appears on, walk through that diagram.
As much as anything, in class what I use is the Sympodium tool, which is basically a stylus that allows me to write on the screen in the front of the classroom, kind of like a John Madden telestrator type of tool. And, for a lot of areas of the course, that ends up being very helpful.
For example, when I teach biology and go over the different parts of the brain, I’m able to kind of draw an arrow in and point specifically to where the hippocampus might be. Whereas if I didn’t have that tool, I would be pointing maybe with a laser pointer to one of the two screens up front, and it wouldn’t really work as well, and students could get lost.
In fact, students that I’ve talked to about that tool say that it’s helpful, and almost makes it feel like the professor is taking notes for you, and is kind of directing your attention exactly to where he or she wants the attention to go. So, that works really, really well.
In addition to diagrams and figures, I’ve also used the Sympodium writing tool to write examples on slides that might be just text-based. I might write in some kind of mnemonic device for helping them to remember different things. There are a number of times in the course where some concept and definition of the concept will both begin with the same letter, and so I’ll say “Oh, here’s an axon, and an axon carries information away from the cell body.” So I’ll circle the “a” in “axon” and circle the “a” in “away” and say, “You probably should never forget this now” given that I’ve given you this little tool to remember.
— Mark Laumakis, Psychology
Did you encounter any problems implementing your approach? If so, how did you resolve them?
Those kinds of things I’ve done with the Sympodium tool, it works really well, it makes it interesting. I do screw up every once in a while with it, and forget to click back from the pen to the cursor, and the writing disappears, or doesn’t appear, and there are occasionally problems like that, but that’s more operator error than anything, and those end up being pretty comical at times, too.
— Mark Laumakis, Psychology