Troubleshooting ActivBoard Issues

As with all technology you have growing pains when you put something into real world application. ActivBoards are no different. You have to look at what ends up running on a laptop in a classroom compared to testing at a controlled lab. We have had different issues with our ActivBoards over the last year, but they have been worked out through proper troubleshooting. Some problems would be the pen would freeze in the middle of a lesson or the sound was distorted.

I always upgrade in batches of test boards numbering 5 to 10. This helps me keep the damage of a bad upgrade to a minimum, while keeping a small number of boards as a control group after everyone else is updated. Problems will grow in the beginning of a release as more teachers use the boards on a regular basis because that is just a statistical fact. But, if you keep up with troubleshooting you will find that you can stop issues before they start.

Filed under: ActivBoard, Educational Technology, FCAT, Florida, K-12 Ed Tech, K-12 Education , ActivDrivers

Class Size?

Ed Darrell writes about Class sizes swell, teacher incentives shrink in his blog Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

In Florida we have mandated class sizes, but unfortunately the districts use loopholes in the way you average or count classes to say they meet the class size when they really don’t.

Technorati tags: Class Size, Education, FCAT

Filed under: Education, Educational News, K-12 Education, No Child Left Behind , Class Size, K12

Pearl Harbor, Our History Forgotten?

With all the emphasis on Reading and Writing in the FCAT and other standardized tests, History, Social Studies and Civics have all taken a back seat.

I appreciate and respect the teachers at our school, but I found it odd with all the new technology, including ActivBoards, Discovery Streaming and just plain old Google that not one teacher that I asked was doing a presentation about the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. It isn’t hard to find something. Are we so pressed to teach reading (90 minute required blocks), writing blocks and now science with it being part of the FCAT?

So, where do we really fit in the history of our country? Do we forget about 9/11, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, World War I, the shuttle disasters, the Boston tea party, the Cuban missile crisis and I can go on and on. Do we just teach selected history or do we do a creative rewrite of history to condense the intimate parts or dates into just main era’s like the Wars of the 20th century? I find it hard to believe that a date that brought us into one of the major wars of recorded history is being forgotten because it’s been 66 years since it happened and the people that were there are either in their 80’s or have passed away. Is it that we are so intent on reading and writing or is it being one of the worst countries in the world in education that we’ve decided that we have to push reading and writing in spite of our history?

I believe we could have taken a piece of our planning time to prepare a lesson on Pearl Harbor. Of course these lessons could have taken just as little as a brief half an hour of class time.Here are just some of the places that I found using technology and just good old Google.

• Wikipedia: Attack on Pearl harbor
• National Park Service: USS Arizona Memorial
• National Geographic: Remember Pearl Harbor
• Naval Historical Center: Pearl Harbor Raid

Some others that I can’t post links because they are on sites that are for use by educators with access, such as Promethean Planet and Discovery Streaming. I found more than one video on Discovery Streaming and one FlipChart on Promethean Planet. Here are the image grabs from my searches:

Have we forgotten?

“A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it.” – Winston Churchill

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana

Technorati tags: Pearl Harbor, History, Educational Technology, Education

Filed under: ActivBoard, Educational News, K-12 Ed Tech, K-12 Education