Promethean’s Activote is a hit with Newent Community School

Having gained extra funding to develop specialist status in the Visual Arts and ICT,  Newent Community School, a large rural comprehensive in North Gloucestershire, looked to Promethean to help the school embrace technology in line with their new status.

What was needed?

Ann Birch, Assistant Head Teacher says “We were considering interactive technology as a long term investment so we needed a partner that could deliver an integrated solution that we could add to and develop over time.” Staff at Newent Community School decided that Promethean could provide the best solution to meet their needs.

The solution

Extending the interactivity of their whiteboards, Newent invested in three sets of Promethean’s Activote consisting of 32 wire-free hand-held response devices to instantly assess whole group or individual understanding. Activote allows teachers to programme their own multiple choice questions and intersperse these throughout a lesson to track student understanding and immediate feedback.

Ann Birch says, “We could see the potential of adding a new dimension of interactivity to the whiteboards, and that used at the right time and in the right way, it would provide an efficient and effective tool for assessing understanding.” Taking it a step further to create an Activclassroom, Newent added Activslate to its interactive teaching tools. This wireless ‘mini-board’ allows teachers and pupils to take control of the whiteboard from anywhere in the room by writing directly onto the tablet, using the Activpen.

The verdict

Mark Ellis, visual learning coordinator, who has pioneered the use of Activote at Newent, says: “Using Activote at the beginning of a lesson is a quick way to assess understanding. You instantly know what the state of play is with a topic and are able to pitch the lesson at the right level to suit whole class ability. And by instantly engaging every pupil in the class, the lesson gets off to a much livelier start.”
Activote encourages honest feedback from pupils. Mark recalls a year eight Media lesson where the technology made an impact: “We were debating the price of teenage magazines and used Activote to hold a quick fire session to find out what pupils spent their money on. Because students could participate anonymously, it produced a much more reliable response.
 
Activote can also be adapted to meet different subject needs. Mark explains: “It is against the grain to use multiple choice in English, but with the right kind of teaching and the right target, it can be used very effectively. Take the possessive apostrophe for example. By having a selection of sentences prepared showing correct and incorrect use, the teacher gets immediate feedback as to whether the class understands its use.” Activote has proved equally valuable in Science and Geography, enabling effective assessment of calculation and estimation. “Students might be too embarrassed to raise their hand to say that they don’t understand a topic, or they might think they understand when they have actually missed the point.

The only way to be absolutely sure that every student has correctly understood is to hold a test, which is where a quick multiple choice assessment with immediate feedback proves really valuable.” When using Activote to conduct end of unit tests, the pressures of marking papers are greatly relieved, Mark explains: “Correct answers are identified and recorded instantly, which reduces marking time. The fact that results can then be exported directly into Excel makes the whole marking process a lot more efficient.”