Impact on Teaching

Given the nature of the projects that we are engaging students and teachers in there has been significant impacts on our teaching.  First, the tablets dramatically shift the ability of students to collect and analyze data in that they can take the equipment into the field for their data analysis.  This has enabled us to change the nature of how course time is used and focus far less on data collection and focus more of our time on analysis and interpretation.

The use of the tablets have also enabled to revision how to engage students in collaborative work.  In particular, given that our project focuses on scientific data collection we can now have students’ collaborative collect and analyze data together without having to return to the classroom.  This has enabled us to cover more material and in much more depth because we do not need to spend as much of our time transferring data and discussion how to share to data.

Having the tablets in our classroom has also allowed us to be more creative in how we use collaborative tools such as blogging and in-class discussions.  We have used to tablets to conduct many more formative type of assessments and engage students in more collaborative conversations than before.  This work was recognized by Boston College because Dr. Barnett was awarded a Teaching with New Media award for the previous year in part due to his work with the tablet PCs in his classes.