EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
EdTech provides consulting, training, outreach and educational services
for faculty, instructors and staff using educational technologies.
During a large lecture class, questions thrown out to the class are not usually answered with eagerness. Rather, when an instructor is brave enough to ask a question to a full auditorium of students, she often elicits a long and uncomfortable silence. To overcome this problem, many large class instructors on the Urbana campus have been turning to clicker systems such as the iClicker. Clickers are remote-control sized devices that have five or six lettered buttons on them. When prompted, students can press one of the buttons on the clicker and the response is recorded on the instructor's computer. Instructors using these systems can therefore ask their classes and receive responses for any variety of multiple choice or ranking type questions. In addition, most systems will not only record the aggregate responses of the class, but also have the capability of tying a particular clicker response to a particular student helping to ensure student accountability. By allowing an instructor to poll a class, ask questions, or garner individual responses from students, clickers open up a number of different opportunities for instructors to make large classes more interactive and improve students learning. For more information about clickers, contact EdTech to speak with one of our consultants.
- Al Weiss
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The digital divide that separates the technological "Haves" from the technological "Have-Nots" is perhaps no more extreme than comparing a highly-wired, Western adult professional with a child in the 3rd World. The laptops and desktops that professionals take for granted are the stuff of dreams for many 3rd world kids. In January, 2005 at the World Economic Forum, Nicolas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab announced an initiative to create a $100 laptop suitable for use by children anywhere in the world. At such a price, governments and aid agencies might be tempted to subsidize laptops for thousands of children. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative was first met with enthusiasm as well as a great deal of skepticism as to the feasibility of overcoming the difficult economic and technical hurdles of producing a $100 laptop that could withstand world-wide conditions and daily use by children. Negroponte and his team have been very busy and their latest model, the XO, is not quite at the $100 price point, but its design has gone so well that Dell and other laptop manufacturers are taking note and some of the new features used for the $100 laptop might one day find their way to your $1000 and $2000 laptop. Indeed, just this year, the first laptops have been deployed in schools and with kids, and the OLPC continues to pick up more and more national, corporate, and private partners. For more information, check out eWEEK.com's "Emerging Technologies," which offers a great update on the XO, including a revealing slideshow that showcases the interesting features of the XO.
- Robert Baird
We've been reading and hearing about digitized books for many years now, but recently the numbers and types of books digitized has grown, and the technology for digitizing and viewing these books has improved markedly. The UIUC library has partnered with important digital library groups and projects, including the Open Content Alliance, the Internet Archive, and the Google Library Project. To view the digital content being generated on our campus, visit the Illinois Harvest web portal. Additionally, our library has begun a great new promotional blog called the Digitized Book of the Week. Besides discovering some amazing older books, the Illinois books (and many others) that exist in the Internet Archive offer some great electronic enhancements. For instance, take a look at Hans Holbein's The Dance of Death published in 1892. The Internet Archive interface is very nice, provides plain text, high and low resolution PDF file formats, and a really neat feature called a "flip book." The flip book is almost like holding the original book in your hands and gives a good feel for the real book.
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/digitizedbotw/
- Robert Baird
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