Abstract
Educational technology has been shown to be an effective mechanism to foster improvements in pedagogical practices in the learning environment. In the fall of 2006, the Virginia Tech College of Engineering became the first and largest public college of engineering to require all 1400 incoming students to own a Tablet PC. The purpose of this requirement program is to better facilitate the pedagogical practice including but not limited to the following mechanisms known to improve learning: highly interactive classroom presentations, student-student and instructor-student collaboration, comprehensive note-taking and review, and a movement of the learning emphasis to more process-oriented lectures and away from simple information broadcasting.
A large deployment effort like the one described here is multi-faceted and requires the enthusiasm and support of a broad number of stakeholders. Decisions on hardware and software choices require input from across the university. Training of faculty and support personnel is central to the success of the initiative. Improvements to infrastructure including network connectivity, additional classroom projection systems and increased availability of power connections are some of the physical plant challenges that require attention. Sound and frequent assessment of the successes and failures of the program, and identification of potentially fruitful avenues to pursue in the future, has been part of the overriding deployment strategy from the beginning. In addition to these infrastructure challenges, the success of this type of program is also dependent on the willingness of the faculty to make changes in the way in which they teach. In this paper we describe our approach to identifying the needs and setting up the infrastructure, and provide information on successes and failures we have had during the first five years of the deployment process. We will also describe the challenges we anticipate as we look to the future of education.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge Dr. Glenda Scales, Associate Dean for Engineering Computing for her leadership in this effort and Dr. Deborah Olsen and Ms. Kimberly Filer for their work on the assessment aspects of the program. Thanks also to Microsoft Research and Fujitsu Computers who along with the VT College of Engineering have formed the Premier Alliance which supports the efforts to effectively use Tablet PCs.
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Tront, J. (2015). Facilitating Pedagogical Practices Through a Large-Scale Tablet PC Deployment. In: Hammond, T., Valentine, S., Adler, A., Payton, M. (eds) The Impact of Pen and Touch Technology on Education. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15594-4_36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15594-4_36
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