Brand new New Media tool for school classes: TeamUp

We are working on a new tool for school classes, teachers and pupils. We call the prototype TeamUp. The idea is simple: it is a tool for creating great teams for classroom team work. You may try the prototype over here:

http://itec-wp3.taik.fi/prototypes/trunk/TeamUp/

TeamUp is designed for touch screens / tablets and interactive whiteboards. When trying it think how it could be used on a large interactive whiteboard in front of the class or from a tablet with a projection for all pupils.

With the TeamUp teacher can add “mental notes” (visual tags) related to the pupils. Teacher can mark who is who’s friend in the class, who do not get along together, what pupils like/dislike, what are they hobbies etc. Adding mental notes is not necessary shown for the whole class, but teacher may do decision on it.

After mental notes are set, teacher or the class together may name topics of interest. After this the pupils may vote on the topics. The voting may take place on a shared interactive whiteboard, with laptops/netbooks/tablets or clicker/mobile phone. The voting happens by tracking your own face next to the topic.

Based on the notes, votes and rules set by the teacher or the class together, the software will put the pupils to teams. At the moment we are working with the algorithm handling the team creation.

For the pupils there is an option to record 1 minute video report after each class. The idea is to summarize what did they learn, what they are planning to do next and report if there were problems. Teacher and pupils may watch the 1 minute reports of each team or they can be watched together in the beginning of the next lesson. This is not yet implemented to the demo.

The software will be open source. Please. Let us know what do you think about it.

TeamUP is developed in the iTEC project. We are reporting the progress of the work in the blog of our work packages where we are developing number of prototypes. This means that TeamUp is just one and there will be more.