Academy Building Classroom - Testing

While we wait for small items to be completed in the experimental classroom, the technology is undergoing rigorous testing. The teachers' requirements for the room are:

1. 1. to enhance Harkness teaching by not dominating the room,

2. to be easy to use, and

3. to allow the teacher to use technology without "breaking the Harkness circle," which means to get up from the table and shift the focus from the student conversation onto the teacher.

The technology in the room includes a projector and screen with an AV rack with DVD/VCR, cable tuner, document camera, VGA and various video and audio connectors. The entire system is managed through a Crestron controller. This configuration allows the teacher to sit at the table with the students and navigate among the various sources through a web page.

The picture above shows the web page used to control the devices on a TabletPC. Through it I am able to turn on and manage what I want to present. The picture depicts the "remote" for a DVD/VCR and a movie is being displayed through the projector to the screen. Note - no ugly cables with which to contend!

Document Camera

Today in my Junior Studies class (which meets in the experimental classroom) I fired up the document camera and moved through a book of old Exeter photos. The students have been reading meditations and essays from and about Exonians of the past, and they are about to move further back in Exeter time in their upcoming assignments. The old photographs allowed them to see Exeter with a different perspective than their own 2007 view. The images were a big hit with the kids, as was the document camera, which resulted in a few spontaneous outbursts of "sweet!".

Audacity is Awesome

I have a language teacher who came to me with a question: isn't there some technology that can help one of my students practice listening to, imitating, and perfecting his second language? This particular student just needed additional reinforcement to hear the differences between his speech and that of a native speaker.

I set the student up with a microphone/headset and helped him learn how to use Audacity (great shareware program if you don't know about it) such that he can listen to snippets of a dialogue, then mute the native speaker's voice and add his own on a separate soundtrack. Then he can compare the two, either by listening to them one at a time or simultaneously. In addition to the auditory reinforcement, Audacity provides a spectrogram of the audio, kind of a voiceprint waveform of the speech sound, which is another cue from which the student can learn.

Through a little practice time, I showed the student that the more closely his spectrogram matches that of the native speaker, the more "correct" his speech is going to be. As a fledgling linguist, I learned how to "read" a spectogram and could identify vowels, consonants, fricatives, and so on by sight, rather than by sound. Audacity has many great features that let you stretch out or slow down the audio, and its visual representation, to help kids who may be more visual than auditory learners improve language acquisition.

At the end of a 15-minute session (much of which was spent just figuring out our approach), the teacher told the student he could already hear a difference in his pronunciation! Such a small investment of time and equipment made such a great difference. The student's face beamed with the encouragement from the teacher and we sent him on his way, headset in hand. Pretty exciting.

Academy Building Experimental Classroom Update

It is so exciting to see that the technology in the Academy Building experimental classroom is finally in place and tested. The wiring for the projection screen was completed today and whiteboards are on order. Although room construction was completed in early September, supporting the start of school redirected ITS resources, delaying the project a bit.

To get a sense of our excitement, take a look at the before and (almost) after pictures.

Before picture:

The work in progress:

The next steps will be to introduce the room to the disciplines located in the building: classics, history, mathematics and religion. Department chairs will determine how the room will be scheduled. A few faculty members have discovered this room, which is located on the lower level. Pictures of the finished room will be posted when available.