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]

Gwinnet Daily Post: Barrow Co. schools showcase new technology classrooms

By Heather Darenberg

WINDER – Eighth-graders at Westside Middle School watched as Greg Book, a senior research scientist at Georgia Tech, used an electron microscope to look at a bee’s stinger.

“That’s a nasty little dagger that bee has, isn’t it?” Book asked.

The students didn’t travel to the institution’s Microelectronics Research Center for the demonstration. Nor has the Barrow County school acquired the $1 million piece of equipment.

Instead, the demonstration took place via a video conference students watched on a high-definition TV in their Advanced Broadband Learning Environment (ABLE) classroom.

Barrow County Schools officials on Tuesday showcased the district’s Direct-to-Discovery Initiative within the ABLE classroom, created through the school system’s partnership with institutions and organizations such as Georgia Tech, Promethean and Safari Montage.

[ Read entire article ]