BUILDING AN EFFECTIVE AND AFFORDABLE DIGITAL CLASSROOM

Grooming digital natives for Malaysia tomorrow

For many adults, memories of their classroom learning experience, especially at a primary level, would include an image of squinting students dodging moving heads while trying to fruitlessly copy down class notes. Fortunately, those days are gone.

Students today are known as ‘digital natives’, a term coined by American writer Marc Prensky, and it describes today’s students who think and process information in a fundamentally different way from their predecessors. Their learning preferences include collaboration and teamwork, flexible learning environment and getting student voices heard in the learning process, as opposed to traditional lecture-type approaches.

The Malaysian government in the Malaysian Education Blueprint (20132025) has stated that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) adoption in classrooms is a critical to scaling up quality education across the nation. However, schools often find themselves either struggling with a lack of understanding on how to adopt these technologies or a limited budget to work with.

Invest in collaborative technologies – starting with the right screen

Using a projector to display a large interactive screen creates an inclusive participatory environment and encourages collaboration, where both teacher and students can interact and contribute to the lesson contents, making learning more engaging and productive.

There are currently various forms of interactive displays available in the market, for example, the interactive projector and the interactive flat panel display. Much like a smartphone screen but on a larger scale, these technologies allow users to interact with the display.

While some may perceive that the flat panel displays are brighter, interactive projectors can actually provide a larger screen with better visibility for a large student audience. Projectors are also more cost-effective for classrooms. Below are some of the consideration factors when purchasing a projector:

1 Cost - For an interactive projector of size 80-inch and above, the cost is a fraction that of an interactive flat panel of the same size.

2 Flexibility and scalability - Interactive projectors project images very well onto just about any solid surface – whether a dry erase board, plain wall or even a tabletop, they can be turned into multi-touch interactive surfaces. In contrast, other interactive displays such as the interactive flat panel will always take up wall space, occupying the space permanently even when it is not in use.

3 Excellent visibility - The projector displays at Full HD resolution, projecting videos and images with vivid clarity.

Another consideration to take note is that many flat panel or other displays suffer from glare caused by the reflection from classroom lighting or daylight from the windows. This sort of reflection is not found on projector screens.

4 Display size matters - Although obvious, some do not realise that screen size is of paramount importance, especially in the common classroom settings. A recent study in the US, UK and Singapore by Radius Research found that more than 50% of the students are unable to read certain content displayed on a 70-inch flat panel display *An alarming finding for schools that have adopted flat panel displays of this size, or even smaller.

The touch-enabled projected images are not restricted to a specific size and can go up to 100 inches or double the size of a 50-inch touchscreen flat panel.

With the large interactive screen size offered by interactive projectors to the budget-conscious education buyers, delivering interactive content to every student in the classroom is no longer a problem.

Transforming Teaching – SEA Perspective

Epson is the preferred interactive projector brand for innovative schools in the region to help teachers to teach more effectively. The company has a strong majority of 84% market share for Ultrashort Throw Interactive Projector in Malaysia, and 84% in SE Asia for 2018.

The versatility and connectivity of Epson’s interactive projector have helped to broaden the possibilities for a teacher’s classroom methods. It has enabled teachers to utilise a wide variety of content from multiple sources with a touch of a button.

It also has the ability to enable annotation directly onto any projected content, including slides, education software, images from document cameras and even pause scenes of videos, making lessons with multimedia contents more interesting.

Teachers can also collaborate with students’ mobile devices, with the ability to connect up to 50 laptops, tablets or smartphones to the interactive projector via the network. Collaboration is enhanced as the projector supports key lesson processes such as sending questions to student devices and receiving their answers for preview before projecting selected answers for comparison and discussion.

Driven by Epson’s Management Philosophy which includes key corporate social responsibility theme, Epson Malaysia has actively reached out to smaller, local schools with lack of adequate, technologically advanced teaching equipment to provide them with the right knowledge and technology equipment to boost ICT adoption across Malaysia. This includes SMK Dato’ Ahmad Maher (SMKDAM) in Kelantan and SJK © Eng Chuan in Penang.

As interactive projectors become increasingly popular teaching tools in classrooms, they will continue to revolutionise teaching and learning to better engage learners with attractive visuals and interactive features – all that at an affordable cost.

* Based on research conducted by Radius Research in US, UK and Singapore. The research was done using a 70-inch class 4k resolution flat panel in a 22’ x 27’ / 22’ x 26’ / 22’ x 30’ classroom-style arrangement respectively. When asked to copy down six short items of information from slides displayed, 58% of students from US, 61% from UK, and 57% from Singapore, aged 12-22, copied at least one item incorrectly.