Work in progress - digital school desk

Session T3D Work in Progress - Digital School Desk Yung-Sheng Chen and Jer-Wei Rau Department of Electrical Engineering, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan, ROC eeyschen@saturn.yzu.edu.tw, joe@saturn.yzu.edu.tw Abstract - Combining embedded computer, touch panel, and cloud computing capability, a newly designed digital school desk (DSD) is presented to further build an advanced classroom or meeting room considering not only e-service but also interpersonal interaction. Based on a highlighted digital ink, the frontier work of our DSD designed is to make a paper-free but paper-like desk which is used close to human nature and can greatly improve educational quality, teachers-students-students interactions, as well as resource preservation and reusing. The core system of our DSD is a web-based portable virtual desk, which can be accessed anywhere and thus like a student’s digital backpack. Our present work contributes a significant education unit, the DSD, to move a simply classroom presenter to a comprehensively future digital classroom. Index Terms – Digital ink, Digital school desk, Traditional classroom, Web-based system. INTRODUCTION Even web-base service has been widely applied to education at present, the teaching and learning interaction in classroom is still a necessary element in most universities. For example, Teresa said that “writing has long been established to be an effective means of expressing one’s ideas, thoughts, and understanding about nature and the world [1]”. It means that paper reading and writing are regarded as a significant factor used in teaching, learning, and examining. However, some issues of traditional classroom-based instruction are usually faced with: short time space, uncertain learning motivation and responsibility, as well as less real-time instructor’s monitoring. To overcome these problems, Chen proposed an interactive teaching-learning (ITL) web-based system [2] being successfully applied for many professional classes during last decade in the EE Department of Yuan Ze University (YZU). Since the classroom-based is still of great importance in most university education, a new research considering user-friendly like human nature is now involved in our ITL system for further improvements. The key contributed unit is a newly designed digital school desk, which will be mainly presented in this paper. In the past, it is sometimes argued that an educational application of technology cannot fit well as human behavior. For example, a PC-based with typing manner for teaching and learning cannot instead human being’s nature learning which is usually a pen-based learning, in which the writing trajectory shows one’s characteristics, thoughts, and logics. Based on this consideration, in our frontier work, the digital school desk (DSD) is built as a human-friendly education unit to fit effectively teacher’s teaching, student’s learning, and interaction between teacher and students in classroom environment. In such a research area, a good example is the Tablet PC-based classroom presenter with digital ink [3]. It has been shown that the sharing of digital ink on slides between instructors and students can achieve a wide range of educational goals and foster a more participatory classroom environment. Based on this highlighted digital ink, in our study, we make a more advanced thought and design to build our DSD, which can be regarded as a paper-free but paperlike desk. It can access any educational information, write anything, keep learning material, and easily interact with others. The core system of DSD is a portable virtual desk, which can be accessed anywhere along internet, thus can be imaged as a digital backpack putting student’s textbooks, notebooks, reference books, homework, examinations, reports, and so on. As a brief summary, based on the digital ink, we are moving the application like classroom presenter to a new era of DSD, virtual desk, digital backpack, and thus a future digital classroom. PROPOSED APPROACH Unlike the tablet PC-based system, a DSD is constructed and fixed by embedding a currently cheapest compact NETTOP with low power consumption into a traditional desk, where touch panel is now becoming as paper laid onto the desk. The pen-based input device is adopted mainly for performing digital ink as Anderson et al used [3]. In such a classroom, both teacher and student’s desks are DSDs. All DSDs are communicated and accessed through a high-speed but stable internet environment. The main computing power is performed at a web-based server site having cloud computing capability for shortening the response time. The server site mainly provides a smart service of virtual desk (VD) for each DSD, where the basic OS and utilities of a DSD are distributed from the server site if a DSD is being actived by an account. This design makes our system easily managed, maintained, and upgraded. The behavior of DSDclassroom can be illustrated in Fig. 1 and described as follows. Given a classroom, let teacher T have a DSD, students Si, i = 1, 2, …, 16 have individual DSDs. When a class is being started, a unique VD corresponding to a course will be sent respectively onto each DSD in the classroom depending on the role being a teacher or a student. 978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX 39th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T3D-1 Session T3D Black Board Screen T T S16 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S8 Outside Classroom S7 • S13 S3 S1 S9 S10 S11 S12 S13 S14 S15 S16 Classroom Internet Cloud Computing Service FIGURE 1 ILLUSTRATION OF COMBINING OUR DIGITAL SCHOOL DESKS IN CLASSROOM WITH A CLOUD COMPUTING CAPABILITY. BASED ON A VIRTUAL DESK MAINTAINED AT WEB-BASED SERVER SITE, ANY MATERIALS HANDED WITH A STUDENT OR A TEACHER CAN BE ACCESSED ANYWHERE FOR STUDYING. Even students and teacher perform different-role in a class, all DSDs will mainly display five movable and resizable regions as described below: • e-book region: Like a textbook, student can page anywhere following teacher’s guidance in classroom. • teacher’s teaching region (e-lecture): It can display not only the teacher’s pre-notes but also the context being taught currently at T-DSD and projected at the same time on the screen. For the later case, we emphasize that teacher uses the digital ink deriving logics and contents just like a traditional manner of writing them onto the blackboard. This ink-based manner is still of great importance in the most engineering education. Of course, the questions and homeworks provided from a teacher may also be displayed at this region. • student’s taking/teacher’s checking notes region (enotebook): Using the digital ink, student can take any note at this region like a usual manner of writing something onto notebook using pen or pencil. This style makes the e-learning close to the human nature. According to the control map in sharing control region and the priority-order list, teacher can preview the marked region of an S-DSD and decide which one is projected on screen for sharing and discussion. • student’s taking/teacher’s checking examination region (e-paper): Based on the questions and homework provided from a teacher at teacher’s teaching region, student can write down his/her detailed answers at this region like as a popular paper test. After due time, the examination contents will be collected automatically into this teacher’s examining folder for further correcting and scoring. The original will be preserved at student’s learning folder. Teacher can use “red” digital ink marking something and scoring on the e-paper. This new saved version will be returned to the corresponding student’s learning folder for student’s further improvements. At this portion, teacher can also communicate with a student for discussion. It is therefore a good teaching-learning platform. sharing control region: This region displays a controlmap for showing which DSD’s information is now projecting on the screen. Student can put a mark (like raising hand for question), then at T-DSD site, teacher can see a priority-order list for the students’ marks and decide which S-DSD’s information projected on screen for sharing and discussion. An advanced design of this function will be of grouping some DSDs and sharing with each other among the grouped DSDs. Based on the proposed approach, we can image that each person has his/her own digital backpack (DP) including e-book (common), e-lecture (teacher), e-notebook (students), e-paper (question by teacher, answer by student, score by teacher, and re-learn by student). If one leaves from classroom, a teacher T can prepare teaching material and a student S can learn/review a subject at anywhere because the unique VD can be accessed easily via internet such as Fig. 1 illustrates. Mention again, the new sharing control function with control map may also work at anywhere thus the group or collaborative learning may be easily performed using this system. Importantly, our DSD design using nowadays technologies can greatly improve the interaction of teaching and learning without losing the human nature. FUTURE WORKS AND CONCLUSIONS Based on our ITL system and the use of digital ink, we have presented a DSD for enhancing the teaching and learning interactions in classroom. To make such a DSD compact, user-friendly, and power-saving, an embedded NETTOP computer with a small amount of storage and a touch panel are adopted. The virtual desk and cloud computing technologies are involved in our newly web-based ITL system. The simplified DSD and distributed server designs make our system easily managed, maintained, and upgraded. As a result, based on the digital ink, we are moving the application like classroom presenter to a new era of DSD, VD, DP, and thus a future digital classroom. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This study was partially supported by the Teaching Excellent Project of Ministry of Education, Taiwan, ROC. REFERENCES [1] Tersesa L. H., "The “write” touch in physics and engineering education", Proc. of 31th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Reno, NV, S3F 1, 2001. [2] Chen Y. S., "Work in Progress - Implementation and behavior analysis on an interactive teaching-learning world wide web system for a classroom environment", Proc. of 34th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Savannah, Georgia, S1F 19-21, 2004. [3] Anderson R. et al., "Classroom presenter: enhancing interactive education with digital ink", IEEE Computer Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 9, 56-61, 2007. 978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE October 18 - 21, 2009, San Antonio, TX 39th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T3D-2