I love the end of the year/new year “best of” features.  It’s nice to look back, review, recognize growth and progress, and spotlight the best of the best.  In 2011, Promethean Planet started with 26,000 resources and ended the year with over 50,000 interactive resources.  Also worth noting is the million member milestone achieved in July.  All good signs that the Planet is thriving as a useful, valuable community.  To see the top 10 most downloaded flipcharts and resource packs, click here.  You know these must be high-quality! 

And, not to be missed is the 2011 top 10 Edublog articles.  Here you’ll find tips and strategies pertaining to using iPads in the ActivClassroom, QR codes, comic strips, and more.  Take advantage of these great “summaries” to kick start new thinking in 2012!

On Monday, December 19^th, 64 dedicated teachers spent their day at Waipahu High School learning more about the Promethean ActivClassroom. Teachers were treated to presentations created by IAAK specialists as well as teachers from various schools around the island.  The Power User Workshop offered teachers of all skill levels something of value – from learning the basics to discovering new ways to add interactivity and engagement to lessons.  Many thanks to our wonderful teacher presenters, Heather Byrne, Danice Mineshima, Ann Tanaka, Cindy Wong, Judy Tateyama, Liz Castillo, and Midori Burton, who graciously volunteered to share their expertise with others.

Click on the links below to explore the excellent resources shared during the workshop.

• Basic Orientation for Teachers
• Introduction to Learner Response Systems
• ActivInspire 101:  Beyond the Basics
• Making Flipcharts with the ActivInspire Camera
• Making it Active!

Much of my work within the last few months has been dedicated to better understanding how the affordances of the interactive whiteboard can be leveraged to enhance teaching and learning in innovative ways.  So, really getting beyond the IWB as a fancy presentation tool and exploring ways the technology can support deep, rich collaboration and interaction.  Just to clarify – when I refer to “interaction”, I’m not just thinking about how a student interacts with the board or content at the board but rather interaction among students around content.  There is so much to discuss (and I will continue this thread in future blogs) but today I will share a research article that describes how IWBs can be used to orchestrate classroom dialogue.  After all, an active, noisy classroom filled with dialogue, argument and discussion support learning and engagement.

The article, “Using interactive whiteboards to orchestrate classroom dialogue”, written by Neil Mercer, Sara Hennessy, and Paul Warwick (faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK) was published in Technology, Pedagogy, and Education in July 2010.  The study investigated how teachers could leverage the technical interactivity of the IWB to support dialogic interactivity.  “Dialogic pedagogy” is defined as “… [pedagogy] that actively builds on learners’ contributions, engages both teachers and students in generating and critically evaluating ideas, and encourages explicit reasoning and the joint construction of knowledge.”  Sounds very constructivist, right?  In the study, three teachers (elementary, middle, and secondary) with a level of expertise in IWB use and dialogic teaching participated in training, designed lessons, and then were observed in the classroom.

The authors highlight the technical interactivity of the IWB:

• Drag and drop
• Hide and reveal
• Highlighting
• Spotlighting
• Animation (shapes can be rotated, flipped, etc.)
• Annotation (text and graphical)
• Storage of all material
• Feedback
• Automatic handwriting recognition and text formatting

The connection is then made between the technical interactivity and affordances for learning based on the teachers’ common belief that “…dialogue should make reasoning explicit and support the cumulative co-construction of knowledge and understanding.”  The study findings show that the IWB helped teachers carry out the following pedagogic intentions:

• Scaffold learning
• Support the temporal development of learning = reduce the cognitive load of students by focusing attention on key content
• Involve pupils in the co-construction of knowledge
• Encourage evaluation and synthesis
• Develop a learning community
• Develop pupil-pupil dialogue
• Support provisionality of students’ evolving ideas
• Guide lesson flow = pace
• Develop pupil questioning

The teachers and researchers found that the IWB supported the widening conception of “dialogue” to include the use of “non-verbal dialogue” – the concept that new digital artifacts were created though annotation, drawing, manipulation, linking, sorting, etc. in conjunction with talk.  And, that these digital artifacts capture students’ developing understanding, becoming powerful assessment measures.  This quote captures it all, “Individual and collective thinking was embodied within a series of evolving digital representations that were purposefully manipulated, reformulated, annotated, saved and/or revisited so that meanings were created cumulatively over time through sustained, responsive dialogue.”  Powerful and inspiring findings that highlight the need to go beyond skills-training and pair instructional practice (in this case “dialogic pedagogy”) with the strategic use of the features and functions of the IWB.

November’s user group took us to Our Lady of Good Counsel School in Pearl City. The session started off with a fun, getting-to-know-you icebreaker with the use of the ActivExpressions. Then attendees gained invaluable ActivInspire skills from our four teacher presenters – Tori Bautista, Daisy Espiritu, Michael Pa’ekukui, and Teresa Pang! Teachers learned that flipcharts can be:

1. made on the spot, which in doing so, includes students in the teaching and learning process;
2. easily downloaded and modified from Promethean Planet; and
3. created using many of the resources available on the ActivInspire Resource Browser.

Check out two of the flipcharts that were shared:

• Mineral Identification
• Needs and Wants

Our free Promethean user groups offer teachers an informal opportunity to exchange ideas and share tips and tricks.  I’ll be blogging more about the ideas shared so that more folks will be able to learn and continue to explore.  Here are recaps from August and September:

In August, Honowai teacher, Danice Mineshima, shared the many ways she uses the camera tool in ActivInspire.  Danice showed how she easily creates flipchart lessons by using the camera tool to take pictures of images on the Internet, online worksheets – essentially using it as a screen capture tool to easily integrate images.  With the assistance of other Honowai teachers, our participants were given hands-on time to help master the use of the camera tool.  Thanks to the talented teachers at Honowai!

This month’s user group was held at Mililani Mauka Elementary where folks were treated to not just one but four teacher presenters! Thank you Dave Morishige, Carita Inoue, Gayle Horie, and Johnna Jacobson for sharing your knowledge of ActivInspire. From learning how to import sound and videos to using the ActivBoard with other software programs and hardware peripherals, teachers walked away with lots of useful information to take back to their classrooms. For those of you that were unable to attend, you can download a flipchart example shared in the session.

Join us for our next user group on Wednesday, November 18, 2011 at Our Lady of Good Counsel School from 3:30-5:30 pm.