Weak guidance with "Look" functionality in handheld-based classroom activities

Wireless handheld technologies can be used to move technology into the classroom framework rather than to move classrooms into the technology framework. To make such technologies effective, we support activities and teaching practices crucial to children's creativity and competence. However, because of the small screen size and distributed nature of some of the activities, it can be hard for teachers to engage in formative assessment, that is, finding out what students know and can do. The current work reports an idea about how to solve this problem and the first assays of this idea in the classroom. We try to enable what we call weak guidance during collaborative activities, by implementing a system feature called "Look."