Teaching in realtime wireless classrooms

This paper describes the educational opportunities and challenges of teaching in a realtime wireless classroom (WC) environment. The WC environment allows instructors to replace conventional blackboards and chalk with a collaborative, networked, portable computing environment. WCs provide a wide variety of new instructional possibilities, including collaborative presentations and whiteboard interaction, live audio and video, animated examples, independent and instructor-directed web surfing, and other powerful multimedia methods. However, making effective use of these realtime interactive capabilities is not straightforward, and there are many challenges involved with teaching in such an environment. This paper describes our practical experiences teaching in a WC the past academic year. The costs and effort needed to prepare course materials for a WC are discussed, and experiments that integrate the WC environment with a distance learning effort are reported.