Promethean Paradise

When thinking about what to discuss for my first blog, I simply looked back at my field experience this semester at Price Lab School here on the UNI campus. I was fortunate enough to be placed in a fourth grade classroom, which is around the age I want to teach. On top of that, I had the opportunity to be in the only classroom in the elementary end of the building that had a Promethean! An example of one type of Promethean is shown in the picture below.

While my co-teacher and I were planning our lessons to teach for our Level 2 Field Experience, we explored the Promethean Planet website for possible lessons, or Flipcharts, that we could use. We did not end up finding anything we really wanted to use, so instead we incorporated the Promethean into our lesson by using the interactive whiteboard features it has. There are so many features that encompass the Promethean, that it would be nearly impossible for me to discuss them all, but the following are a few of the features the Promethean has.

The Promethean allows you to write over top of whatever is shown on the screen with the "ActivPen" tool. So, we incorporated that into our lesson by having the students show how their work to their word problems. There is also equipment you can purchase to go along with the Promethean, like ActiVote and ActivExpression tools.These tools allow you to get the students more involved in the lesson, by allowing them to answer certain questions. You can use the ActiVotes to pose multiple choice questions to your students, or use the ActivExpressions for the students to answer questions in which they type in letters or numbers into a cellular phone looking device. Sadly, we were not able to find a way to involve these in our lesson but I was able to observe them being used on multiple occasions and they are a way to make sure that each student is getting involved in the classroom, not to mention at the end of the lesson you can go back and view the results from each individual device. This allows you to see how each student answered the questions, as well as how long it took each student to answer.

Even more so, the Promethean can be used to project screens from computers and Elmos. They are large enough that students who have vision problems should be able to view what is on the screen as well. This is a truly great piece of technology that will hopefully make its way into more classrooms in the next few years. Overall, the Promethean can greatly enhance learning in the classroom, and I'm very thankful for being able to gain some experience using it during my Level 2 Field Experience.

For more assistance, the video below gives you a brief overview of the Promethean and the Promethean Planet website.






Image of Promethean used with permission from flickr. Attribution given to:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisathumann/ / CC BY-SA 2.0