Epson MeetingMate interactive projectors are helping the INSPIRE Centre at the University of Canberra deliver learning strategies to education leaders.
The INSPIRE Centre focuses on new generation teaching and learning techniques, working with principals, teachers and students to develop quality teaching and learning practice across the faculties of Education, Science, Technology and Mathematics. While much of the centre’s focus is pre-service teacher education, it also is a learning hub for the faculties of Business, Law and Health for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
Opened in May 2012, the INSPIRE Centre is a strategic partnership between the Australian Federal Government, the ACT Government’s Education and Training Directorate and the University to deliver a centre with a firm focus on experimenting and designing new ways of working and learning digitally that is delivering positive outcomes for both the education and business sectors.
Professor Robert Fitzgerald, Director of the INSPIRE Centre and Associate Dean of Innovation said Epson MeetingMate interactive projectors are integral in the centre’s aims to deliver thought-coaching and learning strategies for education leaders by exploring models of contemporary practice and setting new standards for the design of teaching and learning services.
The Centre recently installed four Epson MeetingMate interactive projectors around the four walls of a single room to provide lecturers and students with the experience of learning and collaboration in a technology-rich and fully connected environment.
In a significant project being run by the Centre, the split screen and remote collaboration features of the MeetingMate are also being used to teach farming and land management techniques to a Pakistani village.
Professor Fitzgerald explains the Centre enables talented educators across a range of faculties to deliver studies in digitally rich and diverse environments that blend the professionals’ technical skills, curriculum knowledge and pedagogical beliefs into a rich framework of strategies and practice, which result in stimulating, engaging and challenging learning experiences for students.
The installation of the four MeetingMate projectors in a single room projecting onto separate walls is a great fit with the model created at the Centre, and enables students and lecturers to really embrace the concept of augmented learning. He adds that the technology in Epson’s interactive projectors also enables them to publish outcomes from coursework and research into the latest in learning design and ideas generated from lectures to share on a local, national and international scale in a range of digital formats.
According to Professor Fitzgerald, the Epson projectors are the way of the future both in interactive teaching tools and business collaboration because they directly support idea generation and learning techniques fundamental to successful business and education outcomes, and which in turn underpins the ongoing growth and development of people and the environments in which they operate.
Bruce Bealby, Epson Australia’s Business Unit Manager for Visual Imaging said Epson is the global market leader in projector technology with a range of models specially designed for business and education such as wall-mounts and optional table mounts to create an interactive tabletop workspace for collaborative activities by smaller groups.
A major advantage of the Epson MeetingMate is its ability to replace copyboards, conventional whiteboards and old-fashioned flip charts to facilitate ‘instant collaboration’ without the need for a PC, allowing all content generated including notes and annotations to be saved, printed and emailed after the meeting or class, or distributed across a business or campus network drive for later use.
