Students in Mrs. Borrel’s class at Carpenter Hill Elementary can write or draw on any surface anywhere in the room and it is projected on the screen for the entire class to see. They are using cutting edge AVerPen technology to interact with web 2.0 sites, educational simulations, animations, graphics, video, live document camera images and an unlimited variety of multimedia lessons. The teacher can move freely throughout the classroom while the work of any number of students can be viewed by the instructor immediately.

As part of their language arts curriculum, students in Mrs. Wright’s 3rd grade class at Carpenter Hill Elementary School produced TV broadcasts. The students planned, wrote and produced videos of simulated emergency disaster TV broadcasts. [Shown in the photo is Mackenzie.]

PowerPoint on a computer with a projector was used to create a background, and a Kodak Zi8 high definition camera with a wireless microphone provided clear sound. Although the cameras are very compact, they have an audio input jack so that students can be further away from the camera but their speech is clear.

The students gained experience in public speaking and enjoyed watching their classmates deliver a wide variety of messages.

The room began to buzz with activity, but no one so much as raised a hand. Still, within 60 seconds, Mrs. Turner had 22 individual student responses displayed on an overhead screen,  plotted as a multicolored bar graph. A lively high level discussion began based on the student responses.

This was all possible because the students had answered the question using handheld wireless devices the students call “clickers”. Several times the students answered her questions that gauged student comprehension of the curriculum and to help frame follow-up questions and discussion based upon the results.

The clickers increase class participation as students became fully engaged, forming their answers, contributing to and discussing each result as a class.  The clickers are also a boon for shy students to make participation easier and fun.