Computer Classroom Design

Linda Myers' article "Approaches to computer writing classrooms" really struck a chord with me. I had the opportunity to teach in a lab this morning, and I couldn't help noticing how much more demanding it felt. The brief instructions I tried to provide at the beginning of the class seemed to fall to the floor just after the words left my mouth. I looked out across the room, and all I saw was a sea of Apple computer monitors with little patches of hair just barely rising above them. I could barely see my students, and they couldn't really see - or hear - me very well either. I quickly realized that my usual strategy of standing at the front of the room and "broadcasting" instructions to the whole class wasn't the best strategy in a proscenium style computer lab. I ended up running around the room restating the instructions individually to students who couldn't really hear me when I addressed the whole class. It was all very inefficient.

While I have taught in computer labs several times before - I used to teach in one once a week at UMD - I haven't really had a clear sense of the particular demands each environment placed on me as a teacher. Perhaps because I teach in a lab less frequently now than I used to, the differences really came into sharp relief this morning after class when I felt exhausted after running around trying to keep my students on task.

I think that in future lab sessions I will prepare instructions ahead of time and post them online. This will hopefully allow students to work at their own pace by reading the instructions and completing the exercises on their own. Since the lab doesn't really foster a good teacher-addressing-all-students-at-once approach, I will simply transform my words into documents that effectively address each student on a one-to-one basis.