Orchestrating Learning in a One-to-One Technology Classroom

One-to-one technology classrooms equip each child with a computing device that provides personalised learning tools. They offer promising environments to support individual and small group learning through the affordances of handheld devices such as portability, low cost and wireless communication features. However, there are management problems in the technology-enabled classroom, for instance, lack of support for scaffolding collaborative and whole class working, design of lessons that switch easily from one to another activity, and difficulty in re-using lesson components. In this paper we describe the SceDer system to orchestrate learning with one-to-one technologies. SceDer provides an authoring system for teachers to design lessons, an interchange language (COML) to describe lesson sequences and resources, and a delivery system that enables the teacher to manage collaborative one-to-one learning in the classroom. The system has been tested in school classrooms and has demonstrated its effectiveness in managing orchestration between individual, group, and whole class learning activities.