Mighty mice

Nguyen Thi Thu Lan teaches English with Microsoft Windows Multipoint technology, which allows her students at Mai Dinh Secondary School in Hanoi to interact with her on the computer

Software allowing a whole class to operate a single computer has given a boost to English classes in Hanoi.

The teacher uses her mouse to click a box of text. Voices reading dialogue are heard through the computer’s speakers and the students repeat.

Next comes a multiple choice question and answer session. The large screen displays the question and students race to click the correct answer choice. The winners shout and cheer while the losers huddle together in hopes of a comeback.

Teacher Nguyen Thi Thu Lan says her 6th grade English class at Mai Dinh Secondary School in Hanoi’s Soc Son District had never been so enthusiastic until the school introduced Microsoft Windows Multipoint software.

While each classroom only needs one computer, the technology allows all of the students to interact with the computer, their friends and their teacher as well, says the project’s head Ha Dang Cao Tung.

“It allows me to interact with many students at the same time,” Lan says. “I can check several students’ progress at once and in far less time.”

The students say they enjoy the new program, as their English class is now more like a game show they star in everyday.

Lan said her students particularly enjoy “the number game” in which one group clicks a number 1 through 9 on the screen and an image appears. The other groups have to race to give the English name of the image, including animals.

Lan is one of 90 teachers from 22 Hanoi schools who attended a multipoint training course, says Tung.

Launched in December 2006, the technology has been applied in Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.

Head of the Microsoft Unlimited Potential program in Vietnam, Hoang Tuan Dung, said the project is especially useful for schools that can’t afford many computers.

Dung also said that when students were forced to wait their turn to use a computer in the classroom they often got impatient and bored and misbehaved. But he said multipoint lets the whole class use the computer at the same time.

He said the constant clicking and moving of the mouse kept students interested the whole class, adding that the software could also be applied to math, chemistry and geography classes as well.

Unlimited Potential is organizing the trial project in Vietnam, which comes as part of the Ministry of Education and Training’s initiative to make the 2008-09 school year the “Year for IT in Education.”

Source: TTO