Our school began its IWB adventure with Smartboards. However, despite good local service, when problems were escalated to the US support team, we wouldn’t hear from them for weeks while the boards sat unusable. Therefore, after our first year of the pilot, we began switching to Promethean boards.
Our local vendor allowed us to swap x number of Smartboards for every y number Activboards that we purchased. By next year, we’ll only have one Smarboard left. I left it because the new teacher in that room won’t be using it. That will allow me to swap it out the next year for free if all goes as planned.
However, that’s meant that this year I was trying to support teachers using two different platforms. Earlier this year I’d heard that you could open Smart notebooks on an Activboard. By the time we got around to following up, the place I’d originally read it had pulled the info, but one of my teachers gave it a try and voilá! It worked. We were using Smart Notebook 9, not the new 10, but this now gives us even more options for ready made flipcharts.
Has anyone else had success using the notebooks/ flipcharts cross platform?
In my K-8 district, we are also making the full switch to ACTIVboards. We have a tentative plans to modernize ~10 classrooms per year, which will result in a wall-mounted AB, a ceiling-mounted projector (we currently favor Epson 83+ based on cost and networkability), a speaker (Anchor AN-130) and all A/V cables. We also would like to have one Activexpression set per grade level. Enthusiasm is high and we have several teacher leaders willing to step up and serve as mentor-trainers.
Jeff Johnson
Glendale-River Hills SD
Glendale, WI
jrj1120@gmail.com
At our school (AES in India) we also had some problems with the local channel partner that SmartTech works with. But I think they’ve done a good job at addressing those issues. I heard from someone who attended the BETT conference in London that the guidelines from BECTA are driving all IWB software developers towards a common file format – that’s why most of them now will open competitor’s files. That makes it much easier to jump brands and still keep your old files! We’re sticking with Smart brand for now, and we’ll have one in every classroom by August 08. But as we evaluate their replacements, we’ll be open to other brands.
Warren Apel
Director of Technology
AES, New Delhi
Jeff, Thanks for your comment. I wish I was generating that same excitement. My pilot group has been interested, but were all weighted down under other initiatives and our accreditation review.
Warren,
Your implementation cycle is ahead of ours, but the primary school will have all classrooms outfitted by next school year. Has your adoption been a rapid one?
We tried to take it slow – we had a mix of Interwrite Schoolboards and SmartBoards about 4 years ago, mostly in computer labs. We evaluated options and settled on Smart brand. We rolled IWBs out to about a third of all classrooms a year ago, and evaluated options. Some classrooms had ceiling-mounted projectors without IWBs. Some had document cameras. We’ve had some good feedback from users that helped us figure out what was best for each grade level and subject area. Next up is trying out tablets and DyKnow!
Believe me Susan, the buildup to mass acceptance/adoption of interactive whiteboards did not occur by chance. It’s been my experience that the change process is complicated and relies at much (if not more) on strategic timing as it does on strategic planning. Finding the right pioneers, those willing to accept the occasional glitch (or worse) has been critical.
As well as it seems to be working now, there were other tech-related initiatives that didn’t pan out. Beginning in about 2000, on several occasions, I tried to start a teacher laptop program and even got a core group group of good teachers to come to summer workshops on using technology in the classroom, leadership and mentoring — and it just never caught fire. The participants were reasonably excited to have a laptop but, as something that made other teachers want to participate, it was pretty much a dud. Then, the whole idea of providing teachers with laptops more or less resurrected itself when we started talking about some semi-related topics like electronic gradebooks, digital storytelling and teacher web pages. Suddenly, the laptop program had a waiting list!
I learned that primary teachers and technology are a good fit, particularly when it comes to interactivity (cameras and anything hands on). I’m pretty sure just about every K-3 teacher will be using interactive whiteboards multiple times per day before I can get half of the middle school teachers interested. And with the new instant assessment technologies like Activexpression and Senteo (for the SMART Boards), it’s cooler than ever!
Hi Susan,
I also use Activboards at work, but have been able to download the files from the SMARTboard lesson podcast and opened them in Activstudio.
I have also tried changing flipcharts into Notebook files, which has worked to a certain degree, although Notebook was unable to do some of the actions that were in Activstudio.
my school is so far behind. I dont think they have even thought about the smart notebooks. We are a cc though i guess.