Ryan Kinser doesn’t like being stuck in one place during his lectures.

To provide himself with the classroom mobility he prefers, the associate professor of mathematics implemented Solstice, a teaching technology that enables instructors and students to share content wirelessly to displays in a classroom. With assistance from OTLT learning designers Shelby Herig and Pinar Celik, Kinser used the technology in an engineering mathematics course last year.

“I like teaching from my tablet for pedagogical reasons,” said Kinser, “and the Solstice Pod allowed me to walk around and interact with the students while using the tablet.”

To facilitate instructors moving around to more actively engage with their students, the Learning Spaces Technology team can install the Solstice Pod—about the size of a wireless router—into classrooms. Instructors and students connect to the Solstice Pod by downloading an app onto their phones, laptops, or tablets. They then can share content directly from their devices to displays in the classroom.

“Using Solstice has allowed me to move from chalkboard lectures to a tablet-based approach, where I give the students an outline of each lecture beforehand, and we go through and fill in the details together,” said Kinser. “The students can then spend more time thinking about the parts we are filling in and less just copying down text from the board.”

Want to incorporate Solstice into your classroom? Please contact Learning Spaces Technology at 319-335-1976 or email classroom-technology@uiowa.edu to learn more.