A Teacher's Dashboard: Monitoring Students in Tablet PC Classroom Settings

Networked Tablet PCs have great potential for improving the learning environment in classrooms. By increasing the capacity for communication among participants, they can raise student engagement in, and teacher awareness of, the class; by allowing for a detailed record of the class to be made, they can facilitate educational research. This thesis presents several studies, spanning the period from fall, 2001, to spring, 2008, exploring these possibilities. An early study used primitive pen-enabled computers to allow sharing of teacher notes and student questions. In several studies, Tablet PCs were used simply to record data, either of the teacher's use of the Tablet PC or of the students' note-taking; we present a variety of analyses of those data. In the spring, 2007, semester, we experimented with a partially self-placed class structure made possible by the use of the Tablet PC. In our last study, several classes were conducted in a traditional manner, but with all participants equipped with Tablet PCs; the sole intervention was the provision of a "dashboard" on which the teacher could see the students' work. In addition to presenting results of student surveys, we discuss the design issues for such dashboards