2011/6/29 Rony Bill <[email protected]>: > installed in some places too. Lives of the teachers cannot be made easy if > they are burdened with extra labour of preparing Power Point slide shows > every day or for every topic. What is happening is that the hardware is > being marketed with big ideas and to make it look useful, the teachers have > to make the software.
On the contrary, the teachers I have interacted with have been quite appreciative of these "e-learning" boxes in the classrooms. The interactive whiteboards are not just simply a place to project the computer screen; they are, well, interactive. What you write on the board is stored for later re-use. The marker pen behaves like a mouse pointer on a web page (tap for related information on the board). Teachers already spend a lot of time preparing for classes (my sister-in-law, who teaches Mathematics for Class XII at NPS Bangalore, spends a good 2-3 hours daily preparing for the next day's class). Powerpoint or any other tool at the basic level only substitutes for notebooks in this task. >> I see a whole host of possibilities, really. > > Could you expand on this. I would also like to know from the group if any > research has been done on electronic teaching aids and how have they > actually made a difference. How are things done in other countries? Has > anybody had experiences there? As I said, I did some work for a company in this field a while back. My team visited several schools in the eastern belt (Kolkata and suburbs, Bhubaneshwar, Hyderabad and Chennai); almost every teacher we spoke to had only kind words to say about these products. I personally sat through a class (Class II) in South City School, Kolkata - the kids of the class really enjoyed interacting with the whiteboard. Imagine a geography class with Google Earth. Or a Chemistry class with a periodic table on the whiteboard that responds to clicks. The possibilities are endless. Some of the schools we visited had eliminated all paper/canvas maps and charts from their libraries. In summary, school administrators, teachers and students we interacted with were all impressed by these devices - the only thing that inhibits their adoption is that they are quite expensive. Binand -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
