The Opportunity Presented by a Bare Room

Walked into my classroom for the first time today and got quite a shock: nothing was there.

I mean NOTHING.

The crew is stripping and re-waxing the floors, so they cleaned out the rooms. Now, I knew they did this sort of thing in many of the regular classrooms where there are just desks and chairs, but my room is a little bit different. Basically it's a huge TV studio full of electronics, a row of Macs, a green screen, pro lighting, a sofa, and all my junk. So, it was a little weird to see it bare.

But it started giving both me and the teacher I share the space with many ideas about how to refurnish.

Plan is to go in tomorrow and build the room anew based on our best idea of what a paperless classroom should look like and what a paperless classroom should feel like. First thing we are doing is marking up the floor in a series of taped arcs that will work to guide students for seating arrangements which will be modular and change according to the style and purpose of the lesson. Second thing will be to hang up my second projection screen and make it permanent (that's the screen I've had on a stand that I run our live Twitter feed on).

I'd love to hear ideas from the TeachPaperless community. If you had a big empty room, (and I mean big... like twice the size of a standard high school classroom), how would you furnish it? I've got two LCD projectors, six iMacs, an audio control room, directional lighting, and a few rolls of duct tape.

Let's hear what the 21st century classroom should look like.