Promethean Boards and ActivStudio--Calculus Classroom

A few days ago, one of the new CFF teachers, a calculus teacher, got his equipment installed. He was very eager to get started.

His first question was how he could use the board to fill out a worksheet in MS Word in a way that, when he scrolled thought the document, the new drawings would move with the board. I went down to visit his classroom. I showed him how to use the Word Marker. He practiced a lot while I was there.

What he wants to do is use this to give students notes. I believe he is going to give the worksheet to students, and then fill it in with them--for their notes. There were pros and cons to using the board this way. Ultimately, it did what he wanted. It wasn't text recognition, which worked better--it allowed the students to clearly see the different between the pre-printed worksheet and the added notes. However, he found in very annoying that, once he paused in annotating, he had to wait for the program to scan his notes as images. Then, he was frustrated that he had to reselected the pen tool. And, we found out the hard way that trying to use the pen for anything while the program was trying to scan the annotations was a bad idea.

However, with practice, he got used to the steps he had to take. He later told me that he started using the board with classes that very day.

Yesterday, I got an email from him about ActivStudio again. This time, he was recording his flip charts and wanted to post them to his websites for students to review. However, he was concerned that students without ActivStudio at home would not be able to view the flipcharts. His fear was correct. I looked into the recordings, and at first recommended that he export them as swf files. I planned to see him at the beginning of the day today to show him how.

By the time I got there, he had not only figured it out for himself, but had also found that they wree not posting correctly to his website. When he clicked on the swf files, they didn't do anything. I was about to start trouble shooting, when he saw that he could export them as ppt. Since he was not concerned with the students following each pen stroke as an action, but was more interested in them being able to see the end product, this worked very well for him.

I was really impressed with this teacher for taking initiative, and learning by doing. This is the sort of skill that we want students to have. I think this teacher could be among the leaders in the school moving towards 21st century education.