ABSTRACT NUMBER 4

CITATION:

Tomei, Lawrence. (April/May 1996). Time for Action. Momentum, volume (27), 53-55.

SUMMARY:

The time has come for teachers to replace the blackboards, movie projectors, cassette recorders, televisions and VCR’s with the newest and coolest technologies. To make sure that the current teachers and new teachers can use these new tools, many colleges and universities are offering teacher – training programs in classroom technology. Duquesne University in Pittsburgh created an in – service program for the local elementary and secondary teachers. When the teachers this program, they are questioned to see if they can handle or ready for the technology – enhanced classroom. The questions that the teachers were asked are the following: 1) Have you taken your first ride on the information superhighway? 2) Has your curriculum been enhanced by software, images, sounds and video captured from Internet sources? 3) Do you teach lessons using computer graphics in order to engage your students and increase learning opportunities? 4) Are you communicating with fellow educators who share a love for your subject matter specialty? 5) Have you used technology to assist your students in making life choices regarding colleges and careers?

Duquesne University is expanding their concept of teacher education by incorporating technology into our Quality Teaching Model as yet another instrument in the teacher’s bag of tools. This classroom has the state – of – the – art multimedia classroom. The equipment in this multimedia room consist of 24 Power Mac 6100 personal computers with DOS compatibility cards, 32 megabytes of RAM, an one gigabyte hard drive and a quad speed CD-ROM player. The computers are linked by networks to the instructor’s station, to each other and to the Internet. The instructor’s station has connections to the overhead projector system that can be used to broadcast computer displays, VCR input and cable television channels with soon – to – be – added satellite downlink reception. No more use of chalkboards by a feature called SoftBoard. This is a dry eraser system that can project its screen by the overhead projector while storing the lesson on disk for later access by absent of forgetful students.

PERSONAL REACTION:

I really liked the sound of this room. I wish that all classrooms in college and as high schools had the technology for this to happen. The biggest problem is that this kind of classroom is very expensive. I would like that each student have a monitor and the teacher does the work on the dry erase board and the student see the work on their own monitor. This would also eliminate the erasing of the chalk and the marker of the dry erase because you can just push the button and the board would erase it for you. That could be lazy but just think the amount of time that we as teachers spend during each class to erase the boards. In my curriculum class we are making an in – service project that is very similar to this one. My partner and I have created a PowerPoint presentation for the following subject areas: Mathematics, Chemistry, Social Studies, and English. We did this that way we can show teachers that you can create a presentation for any subject and this is an example. They were time consuming by she has found out that the students really dig the presentations because they felt like they were part of history (my partner is a Social Studies teacher). When I did my presentation during my student teaching the students liked because it was not the same old thing. I also had the students create a PowerPoint presentation that dealt with Mathematics. The students provided positive feedback because they learned PowerPoint and where Mathematics is used.