Paul Quinn addition engages students, even from afar
12:00 AM CDT on Saturday, June 30, 2007
Normally students and teachers don't want the summer to end. That's not the case at Paul Quinn College.
It's not the big homecoming game or school mixer that has students eager to get back to the school's Oak Cliff campus. Instead, it's a new schedule of classes offered in a state-of-the-art classroom equipped with digital blackboards, four projectors and a speaker system that will link Paul Quinn with students and classrooms from four other colleges in Texas.
"It is cutting edge," said Barbara Hawkins, executive director of the Texas Association of Developing Colleges, which includes Paul Quinn College. "This is a program that is able to expand, and that is what hurt education for so long, not being able to do that. This is giving our students new opportunities."
The new equipment features a large digital screen at the front of the classroom – known as a Thunder Virtual Flip Chart – that the teacher can write on. Another, larger board, also set up at the front of the class, displays up to eight screens with different notes that can come from the teacher's, students' or other schools' computers. Images and notes can also be scanned and projected on the screens. Students and teachers can even see when classmates log on to the system because icons with their names pop up and an alert is sounded.
In addition to Paul Quinn, the classroom is virtually linked to Huston-Tillotson University and Jarvis Christian College in Austin, Wiley College in Marshall and Texas College in Tyler. And some students will have the ability to log on from any computer with Internet access. The intricate speaker system allows students and teachers from one school to teach and talk with those at another in real time.
Whether students are sitting in an on-campus classroom or logged in from elsewhere, they can call the teacher and ask questions while the class is in session, using the speaker system to speak with any other students who are logged on at the time.
"Students don't even have to come to class," said Ms. Hawkins. "They can use this program from their home."
The program also allows for students to print everything that is displayed on the screens or save it to a USB drive. Even students who miss class – or attend and still miss the information – can benefit.
"To be able to sit in a classroom and to know that when you slept through it you can get all the notes is just amazing," Ms. Hawkins said.
Right now the only courses using the new system are for education majors, but that's just fine with 27-year-old Kenneth Boston Jr. A former architecture major at the University of Texas at Arlington, he transferred to Paul Quinn after realizing that his passion was teaching.
"When you think about education, a lot of students have a choice to go where they want to go, and they want to go where the new stuff is," said Mr. Boston, a fourth-year physical education major. "That's why they go to the large universities, because they feel like they have more resources there. When they see Paul Quinn, they may be interested when they see what we have here."
Even though he hasn't taken a course using the tools, he said he has experimented with the new equipment enough to know that it would be an asset in any teaching environment.
"This is something new, so it is something to be excited about because it is different," said Mr. Boston, president of the school's Student Government Association. "There are so many options outside of just an instructor and a blackboard. From a coach's standpoint, I can think of so many ways to use this. I can draw plays without having a pad in my hand and showing each player. If players are injured or at home, they can just log on to a laptop and see" the plays.
The system cost the college about $150,000. The majority of that funding came from the state Legislature for the teacher preparation program for TADC, said Ms. Hawkins.
"Normally, private schools don't get money from state appropriations, so this was very special," Ms. Hawkins said.
AT&T also gave the TADC two grants totaling $45,000 to be used specifically for the new education tools.
"This is a major investment for a small, private, African-American school," Ms. Hawkins said of Paul Quinn, which has an enrollment of about 800 students. "I can't even emphasize how major it is getting the funding and having this. It is the coolest thing I have ever seen."
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