Impact on Teaching
This project has influenced notably the teaching practices. Classes have become more dynamic and have higher levels of participation.
Now, teachers can be nearer to their students by walking around the classroom with their HP Tablet-PC used as a mobile blackboard. Through the digital ink the teachers do bearings and annotations on different photos or graphs projected to the class.
The teaching practice of electric systems has been transformed. It’s no longer necessary to separate the classes and workshops - those in which teachers teach to design and assemble electrical circuits - from informatics classes where computers are used for virtual simulations. Currently, with the HP Tablet-PC, you can do both type of activities at the same time.
The project also explored the use of HP Tablet-PCs by the students as digital notebooks. This allows teaching in a “classroom with no papers”, where all the students’ annotations are digitally recorded and available for the teacher to could see them at any time.
In activities that include problems solution, the digital notebooks keep the track of the work that each student have done. Therefore, teachers have full access to their first ideas, drafts, mistakes and successes. As the records of the problem solving processes that the students went trough, are now available, teachers are able to understand the way a learner think.
This possibility is very useful to adjust and fit the instruction activities, and to share and debate with de whole class. As a result, a more helpful way of working is generated.
Besides transforming the teaching practice, this project has professionally enriched the teachers. Thinking in how they will incorporate a new technology into their classrooms, leads them to think about new ways of teaching, and new ways of interacting with their learners.
Teacher Guillermo Feldstein said:
— “We have been teaching Electricity for many years. Now, we had to think how students were going to learn with this new technology, which is also new for us. We needed to have meetings to think what the answers of the students would be and how we were going to organize the classes.”
Engineer Mario Cwi, Head of the Technological Education Department, and in charge of the implementation of the project, expressed:
— “It is very important for the teachers of my team to have participated in this educational investigation experience. The communication and interaction between them increased notably. Trough wikis and blogs, they shared all their experiences, achievements and difficulties.”
Thanks to this project many teachers have felt motivated to use Tablets-PCs in applications that originally were not included in this project.
Some teachers have explored the use of the digital ink in activities of technical drawing.
|Others have used it in expressive Art activities, with ArtRage software - an oil painting simulation program where the digital pen works as a paintbrush.|
After read the book “The Impact of Tablet PCs and Pen-based Technology on Education”*, Chemistry teachers have begun to explore the uses of ChemPad software - especially designed to visualize two-dimensional draws as three-dimensional dynamic structures.