Promethean Humor

In between finding, learning and teaching resources and integration, there are sometimes managerial items that must be handled in order to maintain forward progress in the world of Instructional Technology.

As you know, PISD teachers and students are well on their way through their first year of the PISD Promethean Project. As a part of this project, participating middle school and high school classrooms receive a class set of Promethean Active Expressions (as seen above). These handy devices serve as a communicator to the Promethean board and software. Teachers can present questions, surveys, prompts at the board and students can type or 'text' in their responses which the software instantly calculates and reports on a lovely, interactive graph. It's a brilliant, little gold nugget of a teaching tool!

So, I have these spread across my desk, assigning numbers to each device, preparing them to be distributed among the teachers. In walks a thoughtful 6th grade young man. He asks the common questions, "Hey, what are those? Is that some kind of phone or something?"

"No," I reply, "These are active expressions, students can use them to text their answers to the Promethean Board from their seats. Cool, huh?"

"Yes, so let me get this strait, students can answer with these instead on writing their answer on the board with a marker or something?"

"Yes," I explain, "Students can punch in their answer and the Promethean board will display a graph showing how the students answered the question. This is just one small part of a big project our school district is doing so that students can learn in new and exciting ways."

"Hmmm," he thinks hard, and then- his eyes light up! "Yeah!" he exclaims, "AND our district is saving A LOT of money on MARKERS!"

I smile, my heart warmed by this bright young one. "Yes, I say, eventually, we will be saving money on markers. Good thinking."

As he leaves, he closes, "I hope my teacher get these soon."

Me too, buddy, me too.