A lightweight approach for flexible group management in the classroom

In this paper we describe a session management system for setting up various collaborative classroom scenarios. The approach is addressing the additional workload of administrating classroom networks on the teacher, which is an important aspect for teachers' willingness to implement technology enhanced learning in schools. The system facilitates preparation of classroom scenarios and the adhoc installation of networked collaborative sessions. We provided a graphical interface, which is usable for administration, monitoring, and for specification of a wide variety of different classroom situations with group work. The resulting graphical specifications are well suited to be re-used in the more formal learning design format IMS/LD; this is achieved by a automatable transformation of the scenarios to LD documents.