Promethean Board: Stealing the fire from the chalkboards

If there is one thing I have to say about a Promethean boards is that I have been living under a rock.  I knew they were out there and actually my school bought one my senior year of high school for the computer classroom. I did not take my classes at my high school my senior year because I was taking classes at Iowa State, so I never got the opportunity to be in a classroom with one. My Iowa State classes did not have Promethean boards either so I just figured my school was ahead of the crowd and was one of the first schools around to have one. 

 

After moving up to Cedar Falls my interpretation of my school being the very few to own a Promethean board quickly changed! The majority of my classes at University of Northern Iowa had promethean boards. I was pretty impressed and honestly did not know all the capabilities of the board. Then this spring I did my field experience at Edison Elementary in Waterloo and ALL the classroom had Promethean boards. I was amazed! Most of my professors at UNI use them to give PowerPoints, which really doesn’t use the Promethean board to its fullest abilities.  My field experience mentor used the board for some of her math lessons. There last lesson they were learning about identifying coins and adding them up.  I thought it was a fun new way to switch up a way a lesson was taught. Then recently I found on http://community.prometheanplanet.com/en/planet_guide/w/wiki/weekly-top-10-downloads.aspx you can download premade games and lessons for the Promethean board! How neat is that! This would be great for when a substitute teacher comes in and does know exactly how to teach a lesson. The downloads can guide the students in the proper path and correct then if they do something wrong on the board. At my field experience I was in the special education room with 3 other grade levels. It was a challenge to teach a group of students a new lesson and then have the other students working on something else. Because the teacher was busy teaching one group of kids, she was not available to help or redirect the other students I the right path. I think the Promethean Board Download would be excellent in this classroom situation. The downloads could teach and correct the way of a student’s learning. Most of all what I have learned from prometheanplant.com website is that most teachers are not aware or use the Promethean board correctly. There is a lot more to the board then some may think me for sure in this case. I think most of teachers are just given a Promethean board and encouraged to use it. They are never really fully thought about how to use it. ALL the teacher and professors I know who use them always get frustrated and when it comes down to it, it’s just because they don’t understand how to use it to the best of their advantage.  

 

Image used with permission from Flickr by mrkimmi. 

Here is a YouTube editoral that explains how to download resources from prometheanplanet.com.