This chapter describes Clemson University's LaptopFaculty Development Program and its assessment, offering the program as one model for designing faculty development to successfully implement laptop mandates. The chapter also acquaints readers with the many types of in-class, laptop-based activities that meet best-practice criteria for effective teaching.
This chapter describes successful assignments that made creative use of laptops in writing, literature, and public speaking courses. Some activities moved the session out of the classroom to outdoor locations.When Clemson University's College of Engineering and Science began its pilot laptop program in 1998, the organizers made a courteous nod to Communication Across the Curriculum by selecting a few English faculty to participate. The success of the English courses surprised faculty from the technical disciplines, who didn't expect laptops to make much difference in the humanities. What the laptops did was increase opportunities for and forms of communication, bring mobility to other physical and virtual places, open the door to more innovative assignments, and fully engage students who professed to hate English. More recently, I have found the same success in teaching public speaking. For my students and me, the classroom walls came tumbling down. Composition IThe first laptop course I taught was Composition I in fall 1998. I began brainstorming ideas for laptop assignments with two other laptop faculty members, William Park in general engineering and Bernadette Longo in English. We met regularly to share ideas and offer support to one another as we prepared to embark on this new journey. We were excited but we also had reservations. We believed we would successfully integrate laptops into our classes, but we also knew the potential for failure was present. Although not every assignment I made that first semester or since has worked exactly the way I planned, many were successful.
Too often freshmen fail and fall behind early in our large-enrollment math courses, Calculus for Engineers or Liberal Arts Math, because they do not engage in the classroom and their questions remain unanswered. Bringing Tablet PCs and a projector, obtained through a 2006 Hewlett-Packard Teaching-for-Technology Grant, into multiple sections of these courses, allows each student or small group of students to use the pen/digital-ink feature to submit problem solutions anonymously to the instructor via web-based classroom-interaction software, such as MessageGrid or Ubiquitous Presenter. The instructor projects, discusses, annotates, and saves individual submissions.Communication now occurs with a subset of students who would rarely participate in class, and active learning is achieved across the classroom because all students are primed for instructor feedback. We compare performance on common exams in the sections using Tablet PCs, web-based software, and projectors with our traditional sections. We query students (and instructors) on their impressions of this technology.
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