Baby Steps

After only three days with the board, I am already feeling at home with it, and appreciating the little ways in which it improves the classroom. I remember a speaker at SETT a few years ago talking about how users of new technology begin by doing the same things they used to do using the new technology, and then moved on to looking at how they could use the new technology to do things differently. This rings true!

The whiteboards are fabulous exposition tools. I can move bits of text around the board, refer back to previous notes and create clear diagrams in a way that was either impossible or very time consuming previously.

I have a pupil in my S3 class with a visual impairment. The fact that I can write in a large script means that she can see what I am doing much more clearly. We are also looking at the possibility of splitting the whiteboard signal to a flat screen on her desk.

One of the simple new things the board allows us to do is to have "drag and drop" activities for the pupils: today we had S2 pupils dragging and dropping arrows labelled with decimals onto the number line.

Another interesting side effect of the installation is that the staff of the maths department are talking to each other more! We are already a friendly and communicative department, but over the last couple of days we have been in and out of each others' rooms non-stop, to show off new ideas or to ask for advice. We struggled to work out how to group objects together, until Donald (or was it Craig?) pointed out a sequence of clicks to bring up object properties.

We are disappointed that we have not been able to use the Activslate or the Activote pads yet - we are waiting for someone from IT to come out and install the drivers.