MCPresenter: A mobile tool supporting various collaborative practices in the classroom

1. MCPresenter: A mobile tool supporting various collaborative practices in the classroom Dušan Juretić, Gustavo Zurita, Nelson Baloian University of Chile April 2009

2. General Context • Traditional teaching practices tend to be replicated even in computer-integrated classrooms. • Single-speaker paradigm hinders students’ participation and interaction with the teacher. • With the advance on the technology field, classrooms have started to use devices as Tablet-PCs, PDAs, etc. • Learning outcome of students is increased if they do activities by themselves rather than just listening (“learning by doing”).

3. Mobile Collaborative Presenter • Support teachers' work in a classroom. • Allows bidirectional communication between teacher and students, so: • Teacher can know the learning level of his/her students. • Students can more easily obtain feedback about their work. • Enables students to take notes in class and share them.

4. Mobile Collaborative Presenter (2) • Uses a Wi-fi ad-hoc network. • Full P2P architecture • Runs on PDA & Tablet-PC. • Input based on gestures. • Content can be saved to a XML file.

5. Teacher Delivers Learning Material ( Including problems) Teacher’s Tablet-PC Student’s PDA Figure 1: Delivery of class material

6. Teacher monitors students’ work Teacher’s Tablet-PC Student’s PDA Figure 1: Delivery of class material

7. Students submit their work Teacher’s Tablet-PC Student’s PDA Figure 1: Delivery of class material

8. Collaborative manipulation of the learning material Teacher’s Tablet-PC Student’s PDA Figure 1: Delivery of class material

9. Comparison among applications

10. System-functionality principles • Aid student-student and teacher-student interaction • Teacher: create questions on-the-fly, adapt lecture content to the class. • Easy network setup • Run on mobile devices • Deal with PDA’s small screen size

11. Gesture-based interaction • Gestures minimize number of widgets on the screen. • Natural input, imitating pen & paper. Figure 2: Creating a stroke

12. Questions creation (a) (b) Figure 3: (a) Teacher’s view. (b) Student’s view.

13. Student-teacher interaction (a) (b) Figure 4: (a) Teacher authorizing a student to write. (b) Student expresses that he/she didn’t understand.

14. Presentation path Figure 5: Different ways to navigate through a set of pages

15. Presentation path (2) • Adapt content to the class. • Redefine slide order on runtime. Figure 6: Defining a presentation path

16. Import PowerPoint slides • Reuse teacher’s material. • Can draw sketches over the images. Figure 7: Imported PowerPoint slides

17. Conclusions & future work • MCPresenter combines learning content management with pedagogical practices. • Preliminary usability tests have shown that it is easy to use and fast to learn. • Future work: usability tests with teacher and students should be done.