Texas Statesman on Round Rock ISD Activclassrooms

Digital screens may replace blackboards

In Round Rock, old-fashioned blackboards are slowly giving way to large digital screens; educators say the technology is expensive but worth the price.

By Bob Banta

ROUND ROCK — The old-fashioned classroom blackboard with its eraser dust and chalked lessons on how to spell “c-a-t” or add 2+2 is slowly giving way to digital screens.

The devices — 49 inches tall by 66 inches wide and less than 2 inches thick — look like large computer screens. They can take students on virtual tours of foreign countries, explain math processes, present scientific concepts and display how much each student has learned that day.

“This new technology is great for all students — regardless of whether they learn best by touch, seeing or listening — because it is so interactive,” said Andre Underwood, a third-grade teacher at Callison Elementary School. “It makes students want to participate in discussions and activities.”

[Read entire article here]

CNN Visits Activclassroom in Omaha, Nebraska

Watch it now at CNN.com:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2009/01/07/kloss.goodbye.chalkboard.ketv?iref=videosearch

Brainy board fires up students in Pendleton

By KATHY ANEY, The (Pendleton) East Oregonian

PENDLETON — Cindy Schimel’s eyes sparkled as she sat on a stool in her second-grade classroom and watched the magic happen.

Clutching a long wand, a blonde girl approached the interactive whiteboard — a combination chalkboard, computer keyboard and movie screen. Three columns of words and silly phrases appeared there. The little girl tapped an icon at the top of the left hand column. The computer randomly highlighted a phrase and the she sounded it out slowly.

“Cind-er-ella … ,” she read.

 

She tapped the second column of phrases and an action phrase lit up.

“… set off a stink bomb ….”

The girl tapped the third column.

“… in a dark wood,” she finished.

The other McKay Elementary School students, sitting several feet away on the carpet, burst out in laughter. A boy leaped up to take his turn and set to work with the wand.

“Mrs. McCaughery … met some aliens … at the seaside.”

The reading group busted up again.

Schimel laughed along with them, correcting pronunciation when necessary and lending a hand when a student gazed stumped at the word “dungeon.”

“Do you want to phone a friend?” Schimel asked.

The girl nodded slowly and nodded at a boy who supplied the correct pronunciation.

This isn’t your grandmother’s reading class, and Schimel couldn’t be happier. Gone are chalkboards, handouts and students drifting off on the wings of daydreams.

Schimel received a Promethean Board (also known as a Smart Board) and a box of 32 handheld Activote pods last year after writing and receiving a Wildhorse Foundation grant and started using them in her classroom.

[Read entire article at the Tri-City (Oregonian) Tribune]

ITIE Symposium Linkup in Ohio Sentinel-Tribune

WCESC will provide training on white board technology

Wood County Educational Service Center is in the process of installing two state-of-the-art interactive white boards, enabling it to serve as a site for professional training and development within the county and also Northwest Ohio.

Dr. Douglas Garman, ESC superintendent, hopes it results in teachers with white boards in their classroom asking “what more” they can do with them. Garman noted many local school districts have interactive white boards in classrooms, but the majority of teachers do not have the expertise to use them to their fullest potential.

“Teachers who have the time or interest in using the white boards are only using a fraction of what these boards will do,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Garman described the two Promethean interactive white boards which WCESC is installing as state-of-the-art because of “their interactive, data driven, aggregate information system that can also have interaction with other classrooms live during use. Nothing is more advanced than these boards.”

While attending a recent symposium in England on interactive technology in education, Garman saw a demonstration of live classroom interaction using white boards. The educational secretary of state in the United Kingdom talked with students in Montgomery School in Minneapolis, Minn.

“They saw us. We saw them,” he said, adding that the students were excited to be part of an international symposium.

“They were demonstrating what they’d been doing with white boards, their learning, their excitement.”

[Read the entire article at the Ohio Sentinel-Tribune]