Jeff Bond:
Hello and welcome to another episode of PATINS TV.
I am your host Jeff Bond and this is Episode 52.
This is also our Featured Vendor Presentation.
As you can see I have my Santa Claus cap on because we
are just really days away from Christmas and we have our winter solstice background going.
I just hope I
don’t end up like Buffalo, New York and end up piled with snow around the set in 15
minutes.
Again, this
is our special presentation of a vendor, a featured vendor.
Our featured vendor today is Empower
Learning and they are going to show two pieces of equipment.
They are both from Promethean.
The first
is the ActivTable and the second is the ActivPanel.
Jeff and Jonathan are going to give us a little run
down on just how those devices work and how they will benefit students in the school districts.
Jeff Tucker:
Hi I am Jeff Tucker and this is Jonathan Trietsch.
We are with Empower Learning.
We are a local
education technology company that brings you interactive technology products and solutions
for
students with special needs.
Jonathan Trietsch:
In fact Jeff we are a woman owned business.
We offer a single point of contact all the way from sales,
installation, training and services.
Jeff Tucker:
We have been a Promethean Premier Partner since 2007.
We also bring you solutions and consult on
bring your own device, one-to-one solutions, as well as, gap solutions.
Jonathan Trietsch:
Now we are going to take a quick moment to show you guys a demonstration of the Promethean
ActivTable.
Jeff Tucker:
So this is the Promethean ActivTable.
This is a very collaborative and consensus based device.
It is going
to be something that is going to foster a lot of interaction amongst the students.
We can have up to six
students working around this table at the same time.
It is a multi-touch screen so it allows the students
to be able to interact while working on the table at the same time.
There is an IR bezel around the
screen that allows for that touch recognition to happen.
It is running a Windows 7 computer so there is
no need to hook up any external devices.
It is an all-in-one unit.
Let’s go into some of the activities that
there are over 180 activities available for download right now.
All of those activities are free.
Promethean does not charge for any of the activities that they develop.
They are open source and free
for you to download.
We are going to go into one of the activities and applications right now.
We just
tap on our main screen here.
As you can see it is a very circular based menu so there really is no head of
the table so to speak.
We are going to go into Making CBC Words.
This activity is going to allow us to
work together to create different cards and you will see here in just a second.
Again, back to the
PATINS TV Episode 52 – December 16, 2014
consensus bases I could setup right now for two learners.
I have one here and one right here.
Like I said
you can have up to six working on the table at one time.
I am going to say okay to go into the activity.
As
it loads up the activity you are going to see basically a lazy river around the activity
with all of our
different pictures.
The object of this activity is to take one of our cards out of the pile and we have like
I
said several different students working on the cards at the same time.
We are going to drag a picture
out of the lazy river and each picture is going to have a little yellow icon.
It is a speaker icon.
If you tap
that…(speaker icon saying dog, dog).
It is going to tell you what that picture is if you are not sure.
We
just need to drag that picture of that dog onto our card.
Now we need to work on finding the consonant,
vowel-consonant combinations to complete this card.
I am going to come over to my list of letters over
here, my consonants and I believe this is a D.
We are going to check the little speaker icon just to make
sure.
(speaker icon making D sound) It says the D sound.
As you can tell there are speakers built in.
Additionally there are four headphone jacks so if you have small groups working around
the room you
could have the students working quietly with those headphones on.
We are associate that consonant D
to our card.
Now, we need our vowel consonants.
We have it right here.
(speaker icon making OG
sound) You can see it is giving us the sound there so we can associate that to the card.
Once we have
completed our card we can move that into our basket and we are ready to complete another
card.
We
could have students working on various aspects of this.
Maybe one student is responsible for finding all
the consonants and if they want to drag that card into the river here it can pass on to
the next student
who can take that card out and complete the project.
Once we are finished with this we can go right to our little icon here and go through our
toolbox.
If we
wanted to restart this activity we could do that from the toolbar.
We can do sound recordings on this.
There are inputs for that.
Each activity is going to have the ability exit which is what it is showing right
here.
If we want to exit every student needs to say okay to move out of the activity.
If we are not done
and one student catches that they can just hit that little red frowny face and it is
going to take us back
into the activity.
If we wanted to even send this information to the teacher we could hit that For Teacher
button and here we will say okay.
What this is going to do is create a PDF that will show the teacher
what is going on within the activity at the conclusion of the students being on the activity.
Right now it is
asking us to copy this to a USB.
You could potentially copy that to a thumb drive and put that onto our
computer.
There are four USB ports on the table which can transfer information.
For right now we are
going to say no, but we do want to view the document so here we will say yes.
It is going to create that
PDF document and it is going to show us exactly what was going on at the conclusion of the
activity.
From here we can gain a little bit more information as to what was going on.
We can see the cards that
were created.
We have our dog card here.
We can go into the next bit of information here and find out
exactly what was going on with each student; the amount of time that were manipulating
the different
cards; how many cards they had contained; different sounds played.
That sort of value you can gain
from this.
We can see what the individual students were doing working with different tools.
Then, we
have our heat map and this is going to show us exactly where the interaction was taking
place.
Here we
have it setup for the two students.
As you can see on this side of the table which was my token over
here this is the main interaction points.
We didn’t really have too much going on this side of the table
simply because there were no students or interactions taking place there.
As a teacher you could
potentially be working with other small groups around the room and come back to this activity
once it is
PATINS TV Episode 52 – December 16, 2014
completed and talk with the students and talk through everything that was going on.
Find out if there
were questions and basically have that dialogue with students of what this activity was accomplishing.
We can close out of our For Teacher PDF there and either go onto continue working on the
activity or in
our case, we are going to close out, hit exit, again, we all have to agree.
We move out of the activity.
We are going to go on to play another activity.
That was our CBC Words.
Now we can do an activity called Let’s Go Shopping.
This one is going to be a good activity to help
students understand the value of money and see really how a small economy or commerce
would work.
So we are going to say okay on both of these to opens to move into our Let’s Go Shopping
activity.
From
here we will have six different small businesses so to speak setup.
This is going to have the students
working at each of these individual businesses and buying and selling goods to each other.
Here in our
Toy Emporium you can see here we have a cash register and a list of items that we need
to buy.
We can
talk with the other students and have them sell us the different items like say an apple
if we have the
apple here.
We want to find our other student that has the apple for sale which is going to be in
this
student’s groceries we have the apple right here.
We can go ahead and tap on that apple.
You see that
the apple is 23 cents.
Now I need to get 23 cents out of my cash register.
So I take two dimes out of
there and actually take those out of my cash register, as well as, the three pennies.
We can move those
over to our other student’s cash register and make that purchase.
This is a good activity to show
students the value of money and basically how to buy and sell goods.
Again, the activity we have
different tools that we can use.
One thing that I do want to mention is in the beginning of every activity
there is a Help button which is going to allow us to see the directions for each individual
activity.
So
whether it was our CBC Words activity or our Let’s Go Shopping this instruction sheet
is going to tell us
exactly how to interact with the activity.
We are going to close that out and see we have completed this
activity.
Again, we are going to go ahead and restart that.
Send the information in a PDF form to the
teacher or go ahead and exit.
I am going to exit out here.
Get back out to our Main Menu.
Now, I will point out some of the different abilities to interact with this table.
As you can see, I am sitting
down in a chair.
This is tall enough for a student maybe that is in a wheelchair to be able to come right
up to the table and interact.
Maybe for students that have motor skills issues we can use different types
of pointers and wands to interact with this table.
Again, this is an IR bezel on the table so it is going to
recognize touch points and not necessarily the heat of a finger to be able to interact.
Again, if you have
students that use pointers and that sort of thing to interact we can do that with this
table.
With that we
are going to turn it over to Jonathan and tell us a little bit more about the ActivPanel.
Jonathan Trietsch:
Alright, thanks Jeff.
With me here is the Promethean ActivPanel.
This is going to use similar technology
to what was in the ActivTable that Jeff showed where we have an infrared bezel all the way
around
which will allow the students to multiple points of contact.
In this particular activity the students can
drag different letters out of the word bank to create different words.
This is just one of the many
resources that is available on Promethean’s website called Promethean Planet.
It is a community of
about two million teachers with over a hundred thousand resources that are available to the
teachers
for free.
One of the other things that I would like to show you is an application called Fresh
Paint.
This
PATINS TV Episode 52 – December 16, 2014
allows students to be creative.
We can use any other stylus or pointer.
In this case I have an ordinary
paint brush.
We can grab different colors for our palette and jump in here and paint different things.
In
this instance we painted a tiger.
I do want to jump into one other application called Bing Maps where
the students can take virtual tours around the world.
Jeff Tucker:
Thanks Jonathan.
Thank you for showing us just a few of the activities and applications that can foster
that collaboration and interaction with your students on a daily basis at the ActivPanel.
We appreciate
you spending some time with us today.
If you have any questions or would like to schedule an onsite
demo of the Promethean ActivTable or ActivPanel please just contact us and we would be more
than
happy to work with you on these projects.
Jeff Bond:
Well, I want to thank Jeff and Jonathan for their presentation on showing the Promethean
ActivTable
and ActivPanel.
Two really good devices for use with students in the classroom.
Very versatile and just a
good deal.
Speaking of that I would like to touch base on their website.
It is at www.empower-
learning.com so you need to make sure you get that hyphen in there or it is going to
end up taking you
somewhere else.
They have a lot of different products besides Promethean.
So again, you can take a
look at their website.
We will have that information on our PATINS website that is
www.patinsproject.com.
Information will be there.
Jeff did mention that there is a quick promotion if
you would like to get the Promethean 70-inch board for the 65-inch price they are going
to offer that
until December 23, 2014.
They will take purchase orders so if you want to get that in if you have an
opportunity to do that please do it.
Again, thanks for Jeff and Jonathan’s information on Promethean
ActivTable and ActivPanel.
With that being said we are going to go ahead and sign off.
I didn’t get any snow on my desk so I am
pretty comfortable with that.
Hat got a little bit warm and was messing up my hair so with that we are
going to say goodbye and Happy Holidays.
We will see you actually next year.
This is the end of 2014,
when Jim Lambert, our PATINS Site Coordinator from Crown Point is going to be back.
We are going to
be talking about eReader Apps primarily for the iPad or iDevices even though they still
cover the
Androids.
What we want to do is show you just kind of how you could make a selection given some
of
the study guides and basic skills and stuff that they have available and then you can
go out and check
those apps out for yourself.
Again, we will be doing that January 6, 2015, I believe it is.
Another plug real
quick Thursday, April 23, 2015, is going to be our Tech Expo.
It is going to be here in Indianapolis.
It is
free to anyone that wants to come.
We will have plenty of parking.
We will provide lunch.
It is
completely vendor driven and so people like Empower Learning will be there with the Promethean
ActivTable and maybe the ActivPanel and we will see what they bring there.
Again, vendor driven and
lots of things to do.
That is again, Thursday, April 23, 2015.
With that I will say goodbye.
(Closing music)