Parkside Secondary School embrace the Activclassroom

As part of the Government’s four-year ‘Test Bed’ scheme to establish the positive impact of ICT in learning environments, Durham LEA invited Parkside Secondary School in Willington to take part in the project. The scale of interactive technology embraced by Parkside School would prove to be groundbreaking.

What was needed?

With only one interactive whiteboard in use within the school, Parkside needed to implement a fully interactive solution throughout the school and looked to Promethean to help provide an answer.

The solution

Promethean installed interactive whiteboards in all 47 classrooms in just four weeks. In addition, each classroom was given an Activote system allowing students to have an active response to lessons using wire-free hand-held voting pods. Activslate and the A5 ‘mini board’ were also installed so that they could operate the interactive whiteboards from anywhere in the classroom. In less than a month the whole school implementation was achieved, with each classroom transformed into an Activclassroom.

The verdict

Dave Shield, Deputy Head of Parkside says that “Within a week even the teachers who had been a bit sceptical about the whole thing were able to produce a higher level of quality lessons to pupils. This was partly to do with the fact that one and a half hour’s training was sufficient for us to get the Activboards running and being used effectively.” In particular, the adoption of the Activclassroom by integrating Promethean’s Activslate and Activote has brought great rewards for both teachers and pupils alike.

Dave explains: “The Activote as a teaching tool has huge potential. It enables a higher level of pupil involvement in a vast array of discussion activities, ensuring every one of the pupils is engaged. It is the one piece of kit that has the single biggest impact on a question and answer session and it helps teachers how well a topic has been understood.”

According to Dave, the potential of Activote does not end there: “Where previously you might have had a single child who consistently contributed to a class discussion, now everyone has to get involved. Activote enables you to wait until the very last person has given their answer – for teaching that is a very powerful tool. It also has implications for peer pressure and bullying. As a rule, pupils tend to answer the same way as their friend – using Activote means we can be sure it is their answer. And for the quieter pupils in a class, it gives them a voice they never had before.”

The impact of the use of Activslate has been just as influential at Parkside, Dave explains: “Pupils are able to contribute to the information on the board without leaving their seat. This break down of a physical boundary between pupils and the front of the class has resulted in a greater amount of interaction and sharing of ideas. As pupils are able to bring to life their ideas on the whiteboard using Activslate, their interaction is taken a step further. The added benefit is that any classroom input can be saved in a flipchart and continued in the next lesson.

“Pupils nowadays want to see dynamic lessons and they want life to be interesting and exciting – here at Parskide we’re proud that we can now give them that.”