Promethean Love

Unfortunately our school does not have Smart boards in every class. I don't know the specifics of it all, but I know some teachers in the school have interactive whiteboards (perhaps just middle school?) and they are incredible! Given the fact that we have Promethean products, they likely could be the same company's interactive whiteboards. I observed in several schools that had interactive whiteboards so I was pretty excited to be able to use that technology in my classroom. When I first came into the classroom in August, RM showed me the Promethean interactive "eggs" (proper name is Activote tools) but said that she had not used them yet.

I believe most or all of the teachers have these in their classrooms. While they aren't a complete interactive board technology that is so wonderful, these are certainly nothing to sneeze at! Basically what you do is you type in your assessments or questions that you want to ask the students in the software that comes with the Activote systems. Each student gets their own "egg" and when you show the question on the whiteboard (projected from the computer via the ceiling mounted projector) the students read the question and then push the appropriate button to tell you their response. Each individual egg transmits a report to the computer via the Activhub (seen above) and a report is generated to the teacher with who got which answers correct or incorrect. What an incredible tool! When I first learned about them I was intimidated to say the least. But as my time has passed I have wanted to use them more and more- so I finally went on a hunt to find a teacher who uses them often and figure out how to set these up and utilize this great tool! It didn't take long to find someone willing to help (Thanks MM if you are reading!) She set up my eggs for me, showed me how to use them, and encouraged me to take the bull by the horns. She found a bunch of step-by-step instructions for me to refer to and I have been playing around ever since. I plan to start using them in the classroom on Tuesday doing simple things at first (lunch count) just so the kids get used to them and are comfortable. By the end of my student teaching experience we will be using them to assess for sure! The kids in my class get very excited about technology and I'm sure this will be no different.

As a side note- when I was looking for a picture to post what they look like, I typed in "Promethean" in Google images and this was one of the images that came up... rather disturbing...

In the classroom today I was able to finish my morning routine on time again. I have done this several times this week- which is a huge achievement. There is a lot of material to cover in the morning and I'm always concerned that I will not finish. I'm getting the hang of it more and more though. I'm so glad I chose to take the plunge and have my "mid-life career (crisis) change"!!!