Use the Smart Classroom: A Spanish Professor Tries Several Tech Tools

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By VINCENT KIERNAN

College Park, Md.

"This is the best part of my day -- coming to class," Roberta Z. Lavine whispers in the back of her classroom. In the front of the room, a group of students from her upper-level course in intercultural communication are preparing to play a game that will test their grasp of both the Spanish language and international-business issues regarding the United States and Mexico.

Before class, teams of students used PowerPoint to compose Spanish-language questions about such issues. As the game gets under way, the questions are projected in the front of the room, and the 30 or so students take turns answering them and becoming entwined with one another on a Twister mat in the center of the room.

Although the game is lighthearted, the questions are anything but: How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? (Answer: Seven million.) What is the California law that sharply restricts services to immigrants in that state? (Proposition 187.) What Mexican city had explosive growth in the 1980s due to the development of maquiladoras, or export assembly plants, near the United States-Mexico border? (Tijuana.)

As the game unfolds, Ms. Lavine -- an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Maryland campus here -- cheers the correct answers, while occasionally reminding the students to speak only in Spanish.

Ms. Lavine relies on computer technology for far more than PowerPoint-based games. The centerpiece of the course is an extensive, online collaboration between students in the course and their counterparts in an international-marketing class at the Mexico City campus of the Monterrey Institute of Technology. Working in teams, students from both institutions negotiated a hypothetical joint venture between companies in the two nations. Throughout the semester, the students communicated through electronic mail and chats, as well as through several live videoconferences.

"This could not be done without technology," says Ms. Lavine. But her course is also a vivid example of the challenges in making the technology work as advertised.

Ms. Lavine has lots of technology at her fingertips. In the "teaching theater," which is available to other classes as well, each student in the classroom has a computer at his or her seat, and the seats are arranged in a U shape. The student computers can operate individually or can be controlled from one of the two instructor computers at the front of the room. Display screens in the front of the room can show what is happening on any computer in the room. Video cameras can record live video from several directions, for use in videoconferencing.

And perhaps most important, Ms. Lavine says, she also has the services of Nick Upchurch, a student computer technician who remains in the classroom throughout the class session, troubleshooting whatever problems arise and generally making things flow smoothly.

"I call him my technician magician," Ms. Lavine says more than once. "The support here is spectacular." She notes, for example, that there have been occasional glitches in the videoconferences with Mexico, but the technician in College Park was always able to fix the connection quickly. "When you have the proper support, it's no problem," Ms. Lavine says of videoconferencing technology.

Today, Mr. Upchurch earns his pay. Ms. Lavine wants to give the students a quiz at the start of the class, but for some reason the WebCT course-management software used by the university balks at administering the quiz on the students' computers. Mr. Upchurch tries to project the quiz in the front of the room, but one of the instructor computers mysteriously refuses to cooperate. Mr. Upchurch scrambles to the second instructor computer. Once he gets the questions displayed, students use the decidedly low-tech method of writing their answers on sheets of paper for Ms. Lavine to collect.

After the quiz, Ms. Lavine dons a colorful headdress to briefly discuss Cinco de Mayo, which was a few days earlier. Then they proceed to the PowerPoint games.

In the joint-venture simulation, Ms. Lavine's students played the role of executives of an American Internet-service provider, while the Mexico City students assumed the role of executives of a Mexican Internet-service provider. Several teams were formed, containing students from both nations. Over several weeks, each team negotiated the formation of a third company that would provide Internet services throughout Latin America. The negotiations included the nature of the venture, its length, how it would be marketed, and how much money each division would contribute.

Ms. Lavine says that the simulated international negotiations vividly highlight for students the cultural differences between the two nations. "Until you really experience it, you don't really know what it means," she says. For example, students have discovered that the two cultures sometimes have different perspectives on issues as varied as scheduling and the role of money in the simulated joint venture.

Giselle Y. López, who took the course a year ago and graduated this spring, says that Ms. Lavine makes much more extensive use of online technology than other faculty members she has encountered. "A lot of classes are trying to use technology, but hers is the first to really integrate it into the classroom," says Ms. López. "The other classes are really only starting" with technology, she says.

Some other courses, for example, might require a student to assemble a Web site, but the simulated international negotiations in Ms. Lavine's course are part of the warp and woof of the class, Ms. López says.

By and large, Ms. Lavine's students are enthusiastic about her use of technology in the classroom. Speaking with a reporter at the end of one of the classes (in English, with Ms. Lavine's indulgence), several said that the simulated negotiations were very valuable. Others pointed to the convenience of anytime, anywhere access to online materials, and the ease with which students can collaborate with one another online, using e-mail or instant messaging.

"I communicate much more with my group in this class than I ever have in any other class," one student says.

Some of the students do see drawbacks to heavy reliance on technology. A few -- apparently a small minority -- say they view online communication as depersonalizing and isolating rather than as a route to increased collaboration among students and their instructors.

"I think it's made communication between teacher and student that much harder," one woman said. She also complained that the online system can lose assignments.

But Ms. Lavine says she believes that technology encourages students to interact with one another, and with her, outside the classroom. She says that the approach is the wave of the future. "I use technology every day," she says, "and virtually in everything I do."