Sharing Best Practice

Every few week in my SBT school the teachers have an after school meeting following their staff meeting to ‘share best practice’ amongst the staff. (Bear in mind that it is a really big school, with so many teachers, I still don’t know all of their names 4 weeks on!)

This weeks meeting was ICT centred and really useful for me as a Trainee Teacher, but also for the other staff in the school. The staff were shown how to set up and use promethean whiteboard interactive handsets and a demonstration was given on how they could be used in lessons and also to assist with assessment (in particular AFL.)

I was very impressed with the handsets themselves. They connect up to the whiteboard so that the children can provide answers to questions posed, quizzes set, or exams even. (In a similar vein to the ‘fastest finger first’ set up on ‘Who wants to be a Millionaire.’) The key thing about the handsets is that they can be assigned to a specific child in the lesson – provided the children’s names get programmed into the software first. This allows the teacher to keep a record of who gets which questions right and wrong, ultimately allowing a marking system to be generated as the tests are done. I think this is a fantastic device. From the experience I have gained, I think I will keep computerised mark records once teaching fulltime and I think this would be really good way to do so.

In addition, the children love it! I am really keen to use this with my future classes and can see much scope for its use – mental maths tests, pop quizzes, end of subject assessments; the list is pretty much endless.

I have considered a number of flaws that may well be present with them. These handsets are expensive, so not all schools with be in a position to have them. There is a set of thirty in this school, and I only know of the one teacher that does use them, so in order to make them cost effective, I think they need to be more widely used. In addition, the set this school has, only allows for multiple choice answers, so there is always the possibility that a ‘good guess’ or even a ‘bad guess’ can result in the right answer!! Furthermore, although the software seems to cut out marking and some elements of record keeping, I think the planning and preparation that goes into their use beforehand will probably counteract this time!

Nevertheless, my personal viewpoint is that these are great, mostly because of the innovation that can be brought into lessons with their use and the fun that can be brought into children’s learning!