Three US Air Force bombers cast a soft, white light inside a darkened classroom. Ten students, stretched out in rows, sit behind long, narrow tables, their eyes fixed on the planes frozen against a bleached sky and stretched across a 5’ x 4’ white screen called a SMART Board.

“One way of looking at the film is that the film is about technology,” remarks Joshua Bellin, Ph.D., assistant professor of English. “Another way of looking at the film is that it’s a film about when one relies too heavily on technology. Rather ironic that we are in this classroom packed with technology and we’re watching a film concerned with what happens when you hand things over to technology, what happens when the human element is lost.”

The picture on the screen is a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War classic “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” The class is Film Analysis. The classroom is Room 309, one of the 13 new “smart” classrooms in La Roche College’s new classroom building, which opened this past August (see companion article). The 21st century technology in this new structure may allow professors to teach in ways they never thought possible.

“I’ve taught film before, but I was always very reluctant to do it because you had to lug the equipment around,” said Bellin. “You also had to be sure that the equipment was going to work properly and that the classroom was suited to viewing a film.” Now it’s as simple as sliding the DVD into the player already in the room and making a few mouse clicks or pressing a few buttons on a remote control to bring the images to life.

The SMART Board is much more than simply a replacement for the traditional blackboard or dry-erase board found in many classrooms. SMART Boards display DVDs, videocassettes, website pages, and computer programs such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The boards also allow users to manipulate text and objects by simply touching the screen. The board has high-resolution document cameras that can capture two- and three-dimensional images and broadcast them onto the projection screen. The classroom tool comes with a piercing sound system, an LCD projector, a computer loaded with software and a flat screen monitor

“We wanted to avoid the bleeding edge but we wanted to be on the leading edge,” explains Chuck Winschel, former senior administrator of information technology (IT) at La Roche College. Winschel worked closely with faculty representatives to shape the new classrooms. “It’s a point and click kind of environment with buttons that were designed hopefully to minimize the need for training. Such a scenario minimizes the fear factor that is fairly common in these kinds of installations when the user sits there and says, ‘I don’t understand.’ The feedback on the new classroom technology has been very positive,” said Winschel. Full-time faculty received training prior to the start of the fall 2002 semester. More is planned for the future as the IT Department works with faculty members to determine their needs.

In addition to the SMART Boards, each classroom in the College’s new building is wired for Internet access and cable TV and has the wireless potential to tap into the growing satellite network. The infrastructure already exists to conduct distance-learning seminars by broadcasting lectures or demonstrations from one classroom to the next. That means a class taught by a La Roche professor in one of these new classrooms could be simulcast to a classroom in Europe or Asia.

At first glance, the insides of the rooms do not appear as if they were pulled from the pages of Star Trek. They have tables, chairs, windows, and carpet -- just like classrooms have had for years. Take a closer look, and the differences surface. At the front of the room, thin openings, each about 8” long, line the wall vertically in a grid-like pattern. Just behind the wall, hidden from view, is a material that resembles steel wool. It helps to absorb the sound. Two speakers are mounted about three feet above and on each side of the SMART Board, just below the ceiling’s edge. A gray projector hangs from the ceiling about ten feet from the front of the room. It is roughly the size of a cake box and has a round lens facing the SMART Board. A document camera (imagine a slimmer, sleeker version of an overhead projector) sits on a table off to the side. A black flat screen computer monitor rests on the crown of the oversized podium, which shelters the computer, DVD player, VCR, and a mound of cables and wires.

“The podium is equipped so that if an instructor wants to bring in a laptop, it will facilitate the connection of a video cable, an audio cable, and a power cable. They’re off and running in a few minutes’ time,” said Winschel.

“It’s not that I don’t still use traditional teaching strategies, but you feel as if you want to use some of the technologies in appropriate ways,“ said Bellin. ”You don’t want to use it just to use it. You want to use it when you see that there is an advantage to using it. From my perspective, the technologies are more there to enhance the way good teachers teach than to substitute for teaching, or even to alter teaching.”

The advantages and possibilities are not lost on Bellin’s students.

“I think that everything has been integrated flawlessly,” said Josh Wertheim, a senior at La Roche. “It doesn’t seem like anything was added. Since the rooms were designed around it (the technology), it fits. Nothing seems out of place.”

“You’ll be seeing this used not just in film classes or media classes, but even more basic classes like maybe English or algebra,” predicts Jason Dolak, a
La Roche junior. “Once that happens, the world is open to anything.”

Back in Room 309, Bellin floats up and down the center aisle of the room drawing students into discussions, challenging them to think about the film and its central theme in new ways as he jumps from scene to scene by tapping the buttons on the remote. Technology is neither good nor bad, he says, it’s just how we choose to use it.

Later in the class, Bellin puts his theory to the test.

“Let’s see if I can bounce the remote (signal) off the white board,” he says as he extends his arm toward the front of the class.

The scene changes.

“Oh, that’s awesome.”

And based on the smiles from his students, they agree.