Promethean

By Lillian Mongeau

In the race to develop the classroom of the future, tech giant Promethean has taken another step forward this year with a new product called ActivTable. Think iPad on four legs.

The newest gadget is the latest in Promethean’s range of interactive classroom products—smart boards, classroom response systems that resemble game show buzzers, teacher dashboards—and is the first of the company’s products designed especially for small group learning.

The table is about the size of a wide coffee table and comes up to the hips of the average adult. It’s a 46”, high-definition LCD touch-screen. The surface is covered in “gorilla glass” for durability. It can respond to touch from up to six kids at a time. Students stand around the table, using it for all sorts of activities, from sorting vocabulary words to working out math problems to basically anything you can think of that can also be done with paper and pencil.

And today, Promethean announced a new partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to produce Common Core-aligned math and reading curricula to be taught with their devices.

Company president Jim Marshall said the goal of bringing this product to the market is to teach kids in an environment that matches the way they live today. “[Kids] live in a digital world,” Marshall said. “If we strip that away and put them in a different learning world, those two worlds are going to be at counterpoints.”

All the activities that come with the table are aimed at four- to 11-year-old students and are designed to work best with small groups. The idea is that the table could be one of several “centers” set up in an elementary school classroom. This common teaching practice requires students to cycle around the room in small groups completing different activities at each “center.”

At a recent demonstration, the activity for the table requires students to measure angles. When that task is selected, a dozen brightly colored shapes pop up on the screen. Kids can make the shapes bigger or smaller and twist them around, but the proportions remain the same.

Each user stands at a certain spot around the table. Each spot comes with a workstation that has its own set of tools. The stations and their corresponding tools are each marked by an avatar—a  cartoon character or an uploaded photo of the actual user. This provides the basis for tracking student input.

Once the shapes are on the table, kids can pull out a protractor tool and measure the degree of the angles on each shape. Like the shapes, the protractor shrinks and grows when kids pinch their fingers together or pull them apart over the object. That part is just like an iPhone or iPad, so the interface is pretty intuitive for students.

Once the angle is measured, kids can type out the measurement on a keypad and “stick” the number to the appropriate shape. When the activity is complete and the kids are ready to turn their assignment in to the teacher, they all have to press the “OK” button in front of their spot at the table. The idea is to make sure everyone is in agreement that the project is complete and is meant to promote community-minded thinking. (Though, it doesn’t take much imagination to picture the kid who refuses to ever press “OK.”)

The table then takes a screen shot and sends it to a file for the teacher to review later. When the teacher reviews the group assignment, which she can do right away or after the kids have left for the day, she can see things like how many angles each student measured, or if all the labeling was done by one child. She can even track things like how many times a student attempted to measure an angle on the red triangle before he got it right.

“If they use a plastic protractor, that data is lost in space,” said Marshall. “If they use a digital protractor, you can pull the data.”

That data is key to gaining a better understanding of what’s happening in the classroom and to pinpointing specific kids who need help on specific skills, Marshall said. Of course, for that data to be accurate, students have to use the table correctly. Manipulating the interface is only one part of it. If a student takes out her angle-labeling tool and then everyone shares it, it’s going to look like she did all the labeling, and the other students won’t get any credit. For all that to be clear to kids, the teachers need training too, which the company offers.

As one might expect, the table isn’t cheap — at $8,000, it’s roughly the price of 16 iPads. And outfitting a classroom with the entire suite of interactive tools can run up to an additional $4,000.

So is all that money and time spent to train teachers worth it?

That’s the question teachers and administrators are asking about this and other new technologies with high price tags. What does a tech device bring to a class that a creative teacher isn’t already providing?

It’s not that tools like the ActivTable replaces creative teaching, Marshall said, it’s that they enhance creative teaching by giving teachers the tools they need in the most modern framework possible.

Karon Taver, the executive director of education technology for Ft. Worth Independent School District, said teachers report feeling that the tool was made with them in mind and that it helps them better engage their students. “Do I think technology will replace great teaching practices and great teaching?” Taver asked. “Absolutely not. My feeling has always been: ‘This is a tool for great teachers to come up with great ideas.’”

Taver said her district will be buying a few ActivTables for their special ed classrooms this year. For her, the goal is to prepare students for the future. “Honestly, can you think of a job that doesn’t use technology?” Taver said. “Even your car has computers now.”

Audrey Watters

Another ISTE attendee.

The International Society for Technology in Education held its annual conference and exhibition this week in Philadelphia. While the official headcount has yet to be released, early estimates pegged the number of attendees at over 20,000.

In lieu of our typical weekly review of ed-tech news, we’ve opted to focus instead on some of the announcements that came out of ISTE 2011.

• Educational animation site BrainPOP launched GameUp, a free resource that integrates educational games into the BrainPOP platform. The game titles include “Battleship Numberline” and “Microbes” and come from organizations like iCivics, Filament Games, and Nobelprize.org. The games focus on topics like science, math, and social studies, and like the rest of the BrainPOP materials include supplemental information for teachers such as how to use the game in a lesson, which curriculum standards the game is aligned to, as well as a link to one related BrainPOP topic.
• PBS launched PBS Learning Media, an online resource with over 14,000 pieces of digital content, including video, audio, photos, and more. The content comes from various local public broadcasting stations, as well as other public agencies, such as the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and NASA. The site is available to teachers and parents, and the material is all tagged and searchable, so that information can be found by content type, age type or topic. See our full story here.
• ISTE itself released a white paper this week that offers a first look at ISTE’s new standards for technology coaching. The proposed NETS*C won’t be finalized until this fall, but the white paper discusses ISTE’s latest set of standards and the organization’s recommendations for helping integrate technology more fully into professional development.
• Project Tomorrow and Blackboard released a new report examining the rapid acceleration in online learning at the middle and high school level in the U.S. The survey found that the number of high school students who have been involved with online learning has tripled and the number of middle school students who’ve done so has doubled over the last three years. Furthermore, 36% of classroom teachers say that they too have taken some sort of online class. More than 40% of the students surveyed said they see online classes as an essential part of their learning experience, and more parents and administrators are starting to agree. The demand for online learning opportunities is growing, with a third of 3rd through 5th graders saying they’d like to have the opportunity.
• StudySync announced that it was expanding its supplemental curriculum from the high school to the middle school level. The company provides a library of more than 300 videos that help teach literature and writing. The video lessons serve to help students learn how to analyze and appreciate literature, and the StudySync system also includes peer-to-peer interaction, so that students learn to engage in written discussions around literature. In expanding to the middle school level, StudySync has added new level-appropriate titles, including Alice in Wonderland and Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl.
• Sokikom announced the launch of what it’s calling the first massively multiplayer online math game. Geared to students grades 1 through 6, Sokikom’s game lets up to 30 students in a classroom play a game together. Currently Sokikom has 3 games: Frachine, which focuses on fractions, decimals and percentages; Opirate, which focuses on algebra; and Treeching, which deals with measurement, time, and money.
• McGraw-Hill introduced CINCH, an all-digital, cloud-based curriculum for K-12 math and grade 7 through 12 science. The content is available through the browser, meaning that students will be able to access it on any Internet-enabled device. CINCH includes not just digital text but also education games, an assessment component, and social networking elements (such as commenting within the curriculum). McGraw-Hill says that the content in CINCH is customizable by districts and teachers and is aligned to Common Core State Standards.
• Interactive whiteboard maker Promethean announced a partnership with the Channel One Network. Promethean Activboards will get access to the daily Channel One news, supplemented with various interactive tools.