Technology and Teaching and Learning

The mission of the Center for Educational Resources (CER) is to partner with faculty to extend their instructional impact by connecting digital technologies and innovative teaching strategies. Working under an HHMI grant to Johns Hopkins University to improve undergraduate science education we have incorporated a number of new technologies in the classrooms. These include:

In-Class Voting: In use by many higher education institutions, in-class voting technology enables faculty to poll large numbers of students on a variety of topics: from their understanding of the previous day’s readings to their understanding of lecture material presented in class. Poll results, which appear via a histogram in a matter of seconds, indicate whether or not students grasp the material.

Tablet PC’s: Tablet PCs offer the functionality of a traditional laptop computer with one addition: the ability to “write” on a touch sensitive screen.  This functionality can replicate writing on the chalkboard or overhead, but allows the instructor to save and share their notes with students after class.  Tablet PCs can also be used to annotate presentation slides or to take notes during classroom observations.

Mobile Computing: The initial grant proposal suggested a mobile solution to transform traditional lecture halls into "studio" classrooms, eliminating the need for architectural redesign and enabling universities to employ the "studio" instructional format in all natural science courses. Hopkins is testing the mobile studio science approach initially in physics.

Interactive Maps: The Johns Hopkins Center for Education Resources developed a web-based map authoring tool that faculty use to implement digital field assignments in their courses. “Digital field assignments” are course assessments in which students collect and analyze data from the field using digital technologies.