Applying Wireless LAN Technology To Build A Highly Interactive Classroom

Wireless LAN technology has been developed rapidly in the last few years and has been widely used in many areas. The education field has been impacted greatly by this Wireless Storm. It is obvious that the new technology will have great potential in our future education, especial in the Higher Education domain. Therefore, it will be a new research topic that how to integrate the new technology and the existing education resources to improve the teaching and learning effect, what kind of powerful new teaching and learning experiences are possible.As we known, the wireless LAN technology is a new form of network interface, it has some unique advances and features which can give tremendous changes in traditional teaching methods and models. This paper first analyses the benefits and shortcuts of the existing classroom environment, after that, we trying to integrate the new technology with the construction theory to build a highly interactive wireless classroom environment together with a set of application tools to facilitate the classroom interaction. Finally, we integrate the wireless classroom environment and its application platform with one of the pedagogical models-the Jigsaw Model to demonstrate how such highly interactive teaching and learning environment can best promote instructor's teaching and students' learning.In the traditional class, students will assume a posture of "civil attention" and passively receive while the instructor plays the role of "the sage on the stage" and actively deliver. The highly interactive wireless environment coupled with a compatible instructional design can greatly changed the deficiency in the traditional class .With the support of a set of interaction and collaboration tools, the instructor and students can easily carry out different type of learning and instruction activity, thus help to spark the students' thinking, constantly change their cognitive structure, and further promote individual higher order cognitive development.The following research methods were used in our research:1. Literature SearchIn order to construct the wireless classroom environment scientifically, the author consulted plenty of literature about the application of wireless LAN technology,especially in the mobile learning and wireless learning domain, thus make this research preconscious.2. Program DesignA series of program tools and techniques were used in the building of application platform, such as PHP, Flash MX, ActionScript and MySQL. The application platform has the following function models: (1) Class Broadcasting: The instructor can easily broadcast their image and voice to distant learners with microphone and webcam through the internet. (2) Collaborative Knowledge Building: It is a set of tools to help learners carry out diverse collaborative learning activity. (3) Shared Whiteboard: It helps the instructor and learners to express their ideas and concepts by drawing schema. (4) Quiz: It helps the instructor to build quizzes quickly; the learners can take their quizzes on their digital learning devices and the feedback will be delivered instantly. (5) Poll: It can be used in some circumstance which helps both instructor and learners to make decisions.3. Instructional DesignFinally, this paper tries to explore the instructional design in the new classroom environment, which under the support of the wireless LAN and the set of application platform. We try to apply one of the traditional pedagogical models - the Jigsaw Model to the new environment to demonstrate how such highly interactive teaching and learning environment can best promote instructor's teaching and student's learning.The research in this paper is still in the exploring level. Due to the limitation of equipment, we have difficulties to put the whole design into real practice, and are not able to evaluate the new environment in real circumstance. There are still some problems need to be solved in our further research.