Are you trying to free yourself from the front of the room by sharing course content from your mobile device? Do you want your students to effortlessly display their work for peers to view in class? Are you looking for ways to engage your students and hold them accountable for their work during class? You might be interested in using Solstice, a wireless display option available in many classrooms and conference rooms across IU. You and your students simply download the app and enter a code shown on the room’s Solstice-enabled display. This allows you to easily select and share content from your device to the room’s display.
As the instructor, you can share your PowerPoint or presentation materials from your laptop or tablet, so you are no longer tethered to the podium. You can demonstrate software, run your clicker questions, or share websites, all while moving about the room.
If your students are working on their own devices, they can easily share their screens to show the results of their individual or group work without having everyone crowd around a single, small screen. You can have individuals share their solutions to a coding task or a response to another assignment, getting feedback from you and their peers—a great way to demonstrate the process of feedback or critique in your discipline. Similarly, you can have students display their notes from a class meeting, prompting a discussion about the most important or confusing points in that class, or about effective ways of taking notes.
If students are engaged in group work, you can ask them to demonstrate their command of course concepts in interesting and unusual ways; seeing how other groups represent a concept through an image, concept map, graph, or infographic can be a very powerful learning tool. In large classes, Solstice can save the time required for each group to come to the front of the room to show their work.
In short, Solstice provides you with both a more mobile way to project your own content, and a tool for increasing student engagement and collaboration during class.
To learn more about this tool, attend this short workshop on December 11: “Wirelessly Share Content From Any Device to a Classroom Display Using Solstice.” For more details about Solstice, and to see what rooms currently offer this technology, go to http://solstice.iu.edu.
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