When used to its full potential, the Activclassroom transforms learning by turning traditionally passive activities into a truly collaborative classroom experience. While the technology is well established in the UK, in terms of the number of schools that have installed interactive whiteboards, there is still a long way to go to fully exploit the benefits of the whole integrated solution.
This starts with looking beyond the interactive whiteboard and towards an Activclassroom. Approaching interactive teaching and learning from a holistic perspective, the Activclassroom puts tools at the teacher's fingertips that guarantee engagement with the whole class and ensure total inclusivity.
A personal approach
Giving every child the chance to achieve their full potential is at the heart of personalised learning. To do this, the teacher must first be able to engage with every child in the class. By the same token, every child must have the opportunity to participate in lessons. However, the natural classroom environment is often a barrier to learning, with background noise resulting in as many as one in three words being missed by a student.
To help overcome this teaching challenge, Promethean has launched Activsound, an audio enhancement system designed to be used with an interactive whiteboard. It allows the teacher to speak at a normal pitch as an infrared microphone transmits the sound through an amplifier. This evenly carries the teacher's voice - and important learning points - throughout the room.
As well as ensuring that students can clearly hear the teacher, Activsound diffuses classroom tension levels, because the teacher will not have to shout in order to be heard. It also reduces interference between neighbouring rooms because the amplified sound stays within the classroom.
Assessing the learner response
Hearing is just one area in which learning technologies can support the teacher to effectively achieve personalised learning. Learner response systems are ideal for helping to deliver ‘Assessment for Learning', one of the five components of the personalised agenda.
Traditional learner response systems, such as Promethean's Activote, give the teacher the ability to engage with every student in the room. Facilitating simple question and answer sessions, Activote allows the teacher to ask a question and invite the students to answer using the relevant yes/no, true/false, sliding scale or A-F response. The immediate availability of results makes Activote ideal for formal multiple choice assessment or opinion gathering and discussion. For reporting purposes, it is advantageous as the session can be held with names and the results exported to Excel, saving time on marking.
A new generation of learner response systems from Promethean is giving teachers the opportunity to expand their use of the technology, allowing the collation of richer and more detailed feedback on an individual child's opinion, understanding or progress. Activexpression does this by enabling students to text responses to an open-ended question using an alpha numeric keypad.
However, Activexpression does more than take learner response activity beyond the quantitative to qualitative. It gives the teacher greater insight as well as making assessment more efficient in areas not suited to multiple choice.
Encouraging best practice
As with any technology, confidence and the ability to use the system is critical to adoption. A two-year development and research study undertaken by the University of Wolverhampton, known as the Reveal Project, focused on the effective adoption and use of Promethean's Activote. While the study has helped identify a best practice approach to introducing the technology, it has also provided further evidence that learner response systems support teachers in delivering personalised learning programmes.
For example, the researchers found that students believe the technology helps them to ‘learn things straight away' or ‘quicker'. The immediacy of feedback that a learner response system allows is pivotal to this, as the students do not have to wait for written comments in their workbook. As educators highlighted in the study, personalised learning does not come at the expense of including all students in a session - everyone is involved and has equal opportunity to participate.
For best practice on introducing a learner response system, or to find out more about the teaching benefits they can provide, visit www.revealproject.org
See Promethean's Activclassroom - including their range of learner response systems - in action at stand V25, the Education Show, NEC, Birmingham (28 February - 1 March 2008).
Tel: 01254 676921
http://www.prometheanworld.com/
