reflection

Classroom Dandelions

[By Gloria Fernandez-Nieto, Pengcheng An, Jian Zhao, Simon Buckingham Shum, Roberto Martinez-Maldonado] Despite the digital revolution, physical space remains the site for teaching and learning embodied knowledge and skills. Both teachers and students must develop spatial competencies to effectively use classroom spaces, enabling fluid verbal and non-verbal interaction. While video permits rich activity capture, it provides no support for quickly seeing activity patterns that can assist learning. In contrast, position tracking systems permit the automated modelling of spatial behaviour, opening new possibilities for feedback.

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ClassBeacons

[By Pengcheng An, Saskia Bakker, Sara Ordanovski, Berry Eggen et al.] Reflecting on their performance during classroom-teaching is an important competence for teachers. Such reflection-in-action (RiA) enables them to optimize teaching on the spot. But RiA is also challenging, demanding extra thinking in teachers' already intensive routines. Little is known on how HCI systems can facilitate teachers' RiA during classroom-teaching. To fill in this gap, we evaluate ClassBeacons, a system that uses spatially distributed lamps to depict teachers' ongoing performance on how they have divided their time and attention over students in the classroom.

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