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Collaborative classroom - Spring '09 high school algebra
This version of the connected classroom was designed specifically for a high school algebra class. Because it was used in a live setting, it is a good deal more complicated than the WIPTE version of the connected classroom. In particular, it contains a great deal of code intended to allow for recovery from crashes and other errors; it also has much more detailed documentation.
We built this application for an existing class, where the teacher already had a great deal of prepared material and a teaching style he was happy with, so it has some very specific features that are probably not applicable to many classes. The teacher came to class with three sets of slides: lecture slides; student versions of the lecture slides; and exercise sheets. Furthermore, there were sometimes two, or even three, sets of exercise sheets (which were referred to by colors: orange, blue, or green); the teacher would decide at the start of class which set each student would work on that day. Another unique feature is that the class would be seated in groups of up to four students, where each group could work collaboratively. All the students in a group would work on the same exercise sheets.
The class as just described worked the same way on paper as on the tablets; that is, we attempted to reproduce on the computer just what the teacher had been doing. The functionality we added is a "dashboard" on which the teacher can see exactly what all the students are doing. This dashboard runs as a Slice application on a Wacom writing tablet, which is functionally identical to the pen input surface of a Tablet PC (even using the same writing stylus), and even has exactly the same maximum resolution as most of our Tablets (1024 x 768) but is physically larger (about twice the total area).
In support of this functionality, the application includes a student signon dialog, in which the students give their name, group, and exercise "color". Certain slides are sent automatically from the teacher's tablet to the students. Specifically, the student version of the lecture notes goes to all students, and the exercise sets of each color go to the students who had signed on with that color.
The documentation for this application includes an informal overview of the app, user's guide for the teacher, user's guide for the students, and extensive technical documentation. In each case, about half the document is devoted to recovery from errors.
One-page overview of application
Technical documentation (Why is this app so complicated?)
This application was designed as part of a study on the design of "dashboards" for teachers. (Previous studies on this topic can be found on the publications page; see particularly Peiper's PhD thesis, and the WIPTE '08 paper.) The current design of the dashboard has a thumbnail view of each student's work, which can be zoomed in various ways; it also allows for the teacher to write notes to a student. It also contains an area for "summary information" which is not currently being used. The purpose of that area is to study whether summary information might prove to be useful to a teacher; this is important because, if it were, that would allow this kind of technology to scale to large classes (including synchronous online classes).
We note, lastly, that for purposes of our study, all information entered in the teacher and student tablets is logged. Student ink strokes must be sent to the dashboard for them to be shown, but other information - including all of the teacher's ink strokes, and every button click - is also sent to the dashboard and stored there. Furthermore, each message has a time stamp. Thus, insofar as work is done on the tablets, the class can be virtually reconstructed from the data in the dashboard.
Update: The study was terminated in April, after approximately one month. The system worked very well, but we were not able to find the time and manpower to create a new version of the dashboard. Since the study was meant to compare variations on the dashboard design, there was little point continuing the study.