Promethean – Check
Today marked the first day of teaching with the Promethean board that I hijacked am giving a good home in my classroom. At first I was hesitant to really commit to creating the space in my classroom for the board, because those things, when on the mobile stands, take up a ton of room & I’m already pressed for space as it is. Now I’m considering totally rearranging my room to accommodate the tool (and potentially ticking off everyone who shares with me). What I did today was nothing fancy, I just played with the ability to pull a screenshot straight into the Flipchart and had students identifying vocab (and isolating patterns in Noun Genders). The students seemed to have had little chance to interact with a whiteboard, so they get a kick out of writing on the board. As an instructional tool, it was a cinch to get content onto the ActivStudio flipchart and use it in class. As far as student learning goes, it was mixed. The IWB engaged one student at a time when used like this, so the others needed to have a more structured way to follow along. . .
I still have some questions about the software, so I discovered that there are tutorials and a free Foundation-Level training course offered by Promethean. . . checking it out.
February 8th, 2010 at 7:40 pm
You should try using the “Explosion” tool (I think that's what it's called). Very useful for diagramming sentences. You can type in a sentence and then the the kids can come drag and drop nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. into different areas on the board. I saw it demo'd at TRETC last year ('08).
February 8th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Thanks for the tip! Do you think it would work in German? My 8th graders desperately need practice of this sort. I'll look into it. Have you found that online repository of Mathematics Manipulatives (http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vlibrary.html) useful on the Promethean board? I would kill for a resource like that in foreign languages!