It’s what the classroom of the future -should- look like and it opened this week at the University of Northern Iowa. The room is called Studio I-T, which stands for Innovative Teaching, and it’s bristling with the latest in computer gadgetry. Jason Vetter is an education technology specialist at U-N-I. The room contains things like 20 wireless laptop computers, a video conferencing unit and CD-ROM burners at every workstation. There’s also a “smart board,” an interactive touch screen that puts a computer desktop on a big screen. Vetter says it can replace chalkboards and marker boards, as it’s like an electronic marker board that saves what you write down on it.Vetter says Studio I-T can be seen as a model for what all classrooms should aspire to be, but he says it’s more than a model: it’ll be used for real U-N-I classes very soon.Vetter says the technology in the room is nothing revolutionary — it’s just that no one’s put it all together in a classroom setting before.
