Plano’s curriculum stresses multitasking in classrooms, which means some students might be working in groups, while others are working individually or listening to the teacher. “To get the most personalized learning,” Hirsch said, “everyone shouldn’t be working on the same thing at the same time.” He believes mini-projectors could be a “key component of multitasking in the classroom.”
Silverman, of the New York Institute of Technology, says ultraportable projectors “have the potential of making a real impact” on teaching 21st-century skills, particularly collaboration.
In a traditional classroom arrangement—with the teacher lecturing at the front of the class—”the group becomes homogenized,” Silverman says. The teacher targets the instruction to the middle, ignoring the passive, inattentive students in the back and the more advanced students who might be bored because they already know the material.
The teacher might ask two to four students to come to the front of the room to solve a problem, but the rest are “educational voyeurs,” he says.
But when groups of students collaborate together on a project simultaneously, in different parts of the room, “the level of interactivity goes up exponentially,” Silverman says. “It’s harder for a student to be silent; there is more pressure to participate.”
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Students can still work collaboratively in groups with a pencil and paper, but “students have electronic expectations now,” Silverman says. Working on paper, they would have to pass their work around. But when their work is displayed on a projector and the whole group can see it easily, he says, “they are truly working as a group.”
Silverman is designing a pilot project to test the impact of BenQ’s GP1 mini-projectors on academic achievement, most likely for students in grades 5-8 in New York.
His plan is to “equip groups of three to five students with projectors in an environment where they are interacting with web-based resources and see if that makes a difference.”
The student groups could be formed in different ways, he says. For example, English learners and native speakers could be grouped together, as could weaker and stronger students, so the more advanced students could serve as mentors for their less-accomplished peers. Or, the more advanced students could be in the same group and be given a more difficult assignment. A teacher could mix up the class in different ways throughout the year, depending on the nature of the projects.
He suggests that each group have a student identified as a facilitator, recorder, and possibly, reflector, with those positions changing from project to project. After a group completes its work, the students can use the projector to share what they’ve learned with the whole class.
Silverman said the projectors could be connected to a laptop loaded with educational materials selected by the teacher. Good sources of content, he suggests, include SAS Curriculum Pathways and Verizon Foundation’s Thinkfinity web sites, which offer thousands of free lesson plans, interactive teaching tools, and reference materials, many of which are suited for small-group work.
For example, he said, Thinkfinity has a “persuasion map” activity developed by English teachers that a group of students can use to write a paper making a persuasive argument. It walks them through the steps of stating a goal or thesis, developing the supporting reasons and facts, and writing a document with input from the group.
Livelier lessons
Diane Sheehan, an art teacher at Chenango Forks High School in Binghamton, N.Y., conducts collaborative projects whenever possible, telling students, “No matter what you do in the outside world, if you don’t get along with people, you won’t be successful.”
Sheehan recently acquired a BenQ GP1 projector, which she plans to use for collaboration projects with her students.
She plans to have small groups of students in her video production class use the GP1 to plan the theme for a video, create a storyboard, shoot footage, edit the final product, and then present their video to the rest of the class. She stores videos on an iPod to share with the class, and because the GP1 connects directly to an iPod, she won’t need to convert her files to a DVD.
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