Laptop Screens in the Classroom

As pupils move to laptop screens in the classroom, how do teachers continue to monitor their students?

Some of us may remember the time when schools introduced the calculator for students, and pupils no longer had to think for themselves. The calculators would perform all kinds of mathematical functions, including complex scientific calculations at the push of a button.

Well, times have moved on again and you may not be aware, that now, in the United Kingdom at least and probably many other European countries, students are required to attend class with a laptop computer.

The laptop computer replaces many of the older text book and fountain pen curriculum styles, in favour of a more dynamic, less paper orientated and more exciting ways of learning. Whilst there are many obvious benefits to such a way of learning, including environmental, there are some obvious downsides to the approach.

Traditionally a teacher could walk along an aisle and with a quick glance, see what many students were currently working on, simply by looking down at the table tops and glancing an eye across paper. With up to 40 laptop computers in a classroom, it is clear to see why it is not possible to monitor the contents of all the students’ laptop screens. For this reason, the con to using laptop computers in the classroom is that it is hard for the lecturer to evaluate the students work and co ordinate the class.

Student Manager is based on a wireless network design by Aerohive and includes comprehensive student monitoring tools, lesson planning and extensive reporting systems for schools and universities, to allow them to better plan, deploy and monitor the progress of individual students.

Those of you who are familiar with remote control systems such as VNC and Windows Remote Desktop will already be familiar with some of the features of this product, however there are many more extensive features that lecturers' can use such as "TeacherView" which provides a powerful classroom monitoring and management system, requiring no software to be loaded onto the pupils laptops.

This system of classroom monitoring paves the way for teachers to handle larger classrooms of students and still offer a traditional approach to teaching by allowing the lecturers to maintain a personal approach to individual students from one central location. This type of system may also pave the way for future students to learn from their own homes rather than travelling into a school every morning, this does of course open a new argument as to what social implications this may have on future generations.

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