GPP has ended and I am half way through my PGCE year (sort of). Hurrah! Over the next few posts I will reflect on the nine-week placement and discuss the technology I have seen (and not seen) in action. Today, I will focus on the Interactive Whiteboard and its associated software. In my classroom, we were in transition. The board we had, centralised in the middle of the wall at the front of the room, was a six-year-old Smartboard (from Smart Technologies) which worked with a large stylus type pen, but could be controlled by the PC attached. Although the board was on its last legs in terms of usability and it was slow to respond (although, this could have been the computer it was installed on), there were no immediate plans to replace it. Instead, the software attached to it was upgraded. No longer were lessons to be planned on “Notebook” (Smartboard’s own software), instead Promethean’s more up to date software “Activinspire” was to be used across the school. I downloaded my own trial copy from the Promethean website (available here) to help me to plan lessons at home more effectively. Unfortunately, we encountered a few problems with Promethean. Firstly, even though in many respects Activinspire is like Notebook, there was a significant proportion of the staff who did not know how to use it, and at that point training in the new software had yet to be given. Secondly, due to a licensing error, our copy did not work and would not go past the loading screen without putting in a key-code. This caused problems for one of my maths lessons, which had been prepared at home on Activinspire and therefore did not work, which led to a certain amount of consternation, followed by adaptation and reorganisation to deliver my lesson. From that point on, as the Notebook software was still installed on the school PC, my mentor and I took the executive decision to revert to that, a software that we knew would work. At home, I downloaded Notebook’s trial software (available here) and began to use that to plan. I enjoyed the notebook software and tended to design lesson accompaniments that were brightly coloured and involved interactive problems that the children could solve (particularly useful when covering division 2-step word problems in maths).
A further issue arose which impacted on our use of the IWB. For two-weeks, the internet (both WiFi and wired) went down. This meant that all planning had to be done at home, audio-visual resources had to be pre-downloaded, and interactive games that required the internet could not be used. This lack of internet also affected the printers (which were on a wireless system) which meant paper resources such as worksheets had to be created and printed at home, and photocopied at school (if the photocopier worked, which was also temperamental!) These experiences showed the sheer importance of having a seamless and robust ICT system in place, and being resilient enough to change your plans with not a moment’s notice.
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