REACT Capabilities

Students living in remote and regional locations are often educated by correspondence, HF radio or telephone by teachers living many kilometres away.  As a result, students miss out on the everyday interaction of typical classrooms and may not even know who their classmates are or never know what their teacher looks like.

REACT is designed to replicate a typical classroom where students and teachers meet and engage in an online real-time classroom.  Simply using a standard PC with a webcam and microphone of choice, students can connect terrestrially or by satellite to their classroom.

In their classroom, they can not only see and hear their teacher, they can see and hear their classmates too!  Lip-synched Integrated Audio and Video of the highest quality can be streamed seamlessly without issues of latency.  There is no limit to the number of audio and video streams that can run simultaneously and the video can be enlarged to full desktop size without loss of picture quality.

Students can talk, discuss and debate freely without one audio stream cutting out another although typical classroom protocol usually means that individuals take turns to speak.

As evidence of the quality of the  audio and video, clients use REACT for music and language lessons as well as for teaching hearing impaired students using sign language (Auslan).

In addition to the audio and video, a Class Attendance List is automatically displayed with students' Profiles displayed.  This makes taking the roll simple for teachers and students can personalise their Profile with an image or icon attached to their name.  This can be changed as often as students wish and new images (perhaps of the student sitting on a new bike) often provide a focal point for 'show and tell' for younger students.

Teachers retain control of all classroom activities at all times.  However, students do have the option to put their 'Hand-Up' to get the teacher's attention or to use the Chat (text) tool to converse with the teacher if required.

The Chat tool is used extensively in classes.  For example, the teacher can ask the class a question, ask the students to type in their answer and on the word 'go' students hit the send button and all the answers are received at the same time - eliminating students copying and providing an excellent tool for the teacher to gauge student knoweldge.  The teacher can save the Chat to use for assessment purposes.

Teachers can upload PowerPoint Presentations or slides to provide lesson content.  Students can use inking tools to add content to the slides as required by the teacher providing a great interactive presence.  The inking tools include pen, highlighter, text, shapes, erasor and images can also be dragged and dropped into the slide.  This provides an excellent Collaborative Storyboard for all to work on.  Again this can be recorded as evidence for assessment purposes.

Teachers and students can also upload Screenshots (screen grabs/dumps) into the presentation.  This can be any image, document, web page etc that is open on the desktop.  This provides for spur of the moment inclusion of material into a lesson or provide students with the opportunity to showcase good work they have produced.

Teachers can also Share Applications that they have running and demonstrate live how to do an activity such as work in an Excel spreadsheet.  Teachers can also share students' desktops with the rest of the class if desired to show good work for example or to enable students to demonstrate things too.  An example is for students to show  PowerPoint presentations they have made, using desktop sharing whilst at the same time verbally explaining how/why they did it.  It also provides a tool for the teachers to check on a student's progress or to help with any difficulty the student may be having. 

Their are two options for the teacher to Share their Internet Browswer.  One permits the teacher to show a web page of relevance and retain control of the browser.  The other allows the teacher to take the students to a website of interest and then allow the students to do their own research on that site.  A click of the teacher's mouse immediately brings them back to the page the teacher is on.  This provides flexibility for research whilst maintaining a safe environment.

Windows Media Files can be played at any time in the lesson and video and DVDs can also be played where suitable video and DVD players are connected.

REACT provides a capability for File Transferring where any number of files can be sent out to all students such as homework, lesson notes or even school letters.  Students can also  transfer files to the rest of the class if required.

All REACT lessons can be fully Recorded, Edited and Replayed as required.  This provides great evidence of learning and also provides a great resource to be used again at a later date.  Students who may have missed lessons can watch a replayed lesson or can watch it again for revision purposes.

Individual components that can be recorded if the full lesson is not, are the PowerPoint, inserted Screenshots, Collaborative Storyboard and Chat content.

With such amazing quality of audio and video over both satellite and terrestrial networks, together with a huge range of engaging and interactive capabilities, REACT provides the perfect solution for distance learning.  Shouldn't you be using REACT?

If you have any questions about the capabilities, please email us for a prompt response.