Captur.me

CAPTUR is an acronym for Class Answer Paddle To Understand Responses. It is a hand-held tool for students, which has been developed jointly by Paul Shimizu and Bill Pellowe.

My initial reason for being involved in developing CAPTUR came about from discussions with Bill. At first I simply wanted something that would encourage more student participation and involvement with the view to getting more attentive listening from my students. I also wanted something decidedly low-tech, which would fit in with my general philosophy of being organic. Organic education for me is being in the classroom with very basic tools whilst attempting to stay in the focus of my students and having the students in my focus.

Listening is a major element of language acquisition especially with respect to language classes, which have an emphasis on language for communication as opposed to simply passing a test. All language is composed of streams of sound, which can only really be mimicked through constant listening. So by using CAPTUR creatively a teacher can have students listening and responding with the CAPTUR tool without having to speak. Of course we want our students to speak but listening must come first. Many of us are expecting our students to reproduce sound far too early, so CAPTUR is a tool which allows the teachers to ask a lot of questions to the whole class at one time. Thus creating both a greater degree of participation and a method for checking understanding. It is non-threatening and very easy to use while at the seem time keeping students focused.

But the more I think about the use of CAPTUR and the more I muse on it, the more I see that it has much wider uses both in other educational areas as well as a variety of meeting and other group activities meetings.