M-Learning in my work place

The department that is responsible for technology development and technology application used in teaching and learning in our University is called Publishing Technology Center (PTC); its mission is to integrate design, media and publishing technologies to support teaching and learning, research and publicity of the University.
There are several services it provides that are quite useful and enables mobile learning in our University. One of them is called “RVC” - Remote Video Capture which is used by a lot of faculties and being highly appraised by students. Almost every lecture classroom and lecture theater is equipped with RVC system.

Faculties will need to make the booking of the service first (by providing information on class venue and class time), and then the video recording of the whole lecture will be started automatically without any set up. You may see it as a simple video recording, what’s the big deal? Actually it does more than video recording, you can see from the following picture how it different from traditional video recording. Basically, it separates the screen into two parts, on the left hand side, you will see professor is lecturing; and on the right hand side, it shows the presentation slides during the class or what is being written on the white board. It synchronizes the lecturing from professor and PowerPoint slides Presentation. So you don’t need to refer to print outs of the ppt when you’re listening. One amazing thing is that the camera could sense the movement of Professors and adjust the angles for best video recording.

Another good thing is that it also allows concurrent video recording, which means classes happen at the same time can be recorded simultaneously.

When students want to review the class for whatever reason (maybe they skipped the class for a job interview or they attended a party last night), they could always get to the website and input their University account and password to see the lecture video from their dorm or their home.

Lesson 1 Activity: Oscar Chan

PowerPoint

When I was a secondary school student, that was the moment that the Government start to popularize IT in education. My Pure Math teacher try to start using PowerPoint as a teaching material.  It seem she spent lot of time to add the mathematics symbol on the slides, but my classmates and I found that it is no different from using chalk and talk. We just thought it was a waste of time. At that time I started to think over the meaning of IT in education. Is it only mean that we must using IT technology instead of traditional method, or only a alternative way for teaching and learning?

Now I am a teacher, and I use PowerPoint too. But i am not using it only as a storage of notes, but as a way to attract the attention of students. So I always add a lot of beautiful pictures or multimedia on the slides but not put all my notes on it. And if I found the topic is better to present by chalk and talk, I do so.

Oscar Chan 2010/09/12