Improved interaction

Prime objective was to increase interaction in the delivery of dual-trade courses. 

During the morning of the 27th of May, a full video-conference was conducted between Melbourne & Hamilton. More attention was given to promote interaction between participants and the teacher. Various technologies put to use at the same time to get better learning experience out of materials presented.

Graham Williams was the instructor and he presented the introduction to "Temperature", by use of a PowerPoint presentation that included Keepad technology. Throughout the session, which ran for approximately 80 minutes, the students had numerous opportunities to interact via the KeePads to various aspects of the material. As an instructor sitting in on the viewing end of Graham's presentation, it was an opportunity for me to observe the look and feel of video-conference delivery and note directly the students responses. As was common, the students seem reluctant to volunteer answers via video-conference. It may be that in the classroom we use direct eye contact a lot more than we realise in prompting students to respond to questions. For this reason the use of technology like Keepad becomes vital if remote delivery is to be pursued. Keepad has the facility to be used over the internet, and does not rely on a specialised clicker--a smart mobile phone is capable of being used as a fully functional alternative. (Due to technology issues with the video-conference system, Keepad was only implemented locally at Hamilton for this test).

In the afternoon session of face to face teaching, Zing interactive technology was used. Zing is similar to Keepad, but the students have a full computer keyboard and may write paragraph length responses to questions, and the related host screen shows all the responses from all the keyboards. It is an invaluable brainstorming tool--one of the students commented on this during the session--and is a means of eliciting responses form the entire class, not just the extroverts. During the session a few opportunities were taken to use the technology, as a means of seeing what they retained form the morning session, and also in 'brainstorming' mode. Its biggest use however came at the close of the day, when we used it instead of feedback sheets, to get the students to comment on the two sessions. I believe that this technology allowed us to get some excellent feedback, from all the students--some responding multiple times to a single feedback question, and I believe that each student responded at least once to each question--something that does not always happen with hard-copy feedback forms.

Zing is also able to be used over the internet from any internet connected computer, and does not require dedicated keyboards.