Promethean Learning

Today I’m at the University of Pedagogy in Ho Chi Minh City. The point of this trip is to attend a 4 day course that is being run in partnership with VSION Global – the main suppliers of Promethean IWBs in Vietnam. The goal is to train teachers here in HCMC as part of Promethean’s goal of ensuring coverage and progression within the Vietnamese schools and increasing the use of ICT within mainstream classes.

The Goal is pretty ambitious; Alex Chua, South East Asia manager, mentioned that by the end of the training and deployment to HCMC schools, Vietnam will be the leading user of Promethean IWB in South East Asia. A goal that could well be achieved judging the competency of the trainees here. Although, I feel the figures he’s mentioning would either be by ratio of teachers per board. This leads me to think about cost – I have lead the project for our school to use the boards and implement the full use in all classrooms and departments from Reception to Year 6 on all primary campuses. The installation is now part of the running costs of the school and they have been relatively high. What I began to think about during this course was how Vietnamese schools are able to afford this and how would they continue to use this powerful tool as part of the Development plan. At our school we have found that we were better placed to install over 3  years, first as a pilot with 3 boards replacing the SMARTs we had, then following up the install with upper and lower parts of the school. There are cheaper solutions of course like the use of a tablet instead of the board itself and combining it with a projector – but this really deviates away from the the interactivity that the boards promote.

The cost is much, much lower for the Activ Slates than that of a board (Activ Slates are like a hand held interactive wireless board that transmits the mouse movements to the display). Perhaps Promethean are aiming the software to be used by teachers and childen and not the boards themselves. Either way the fact that they are setting up an academy here for these teachers to train others is great and it means that our training can be incorporated into it for the local international schools. I just hope that Promethean don’t get too swallowed up in self promotion and lose the key purchasers’ interests.

Further info: www.prometheanworld.com and www.prometheanlearning.com (for product and training documentation)

How Big is the Internet?

This article has raised some questions I would like to bring to ICT lessons in August when we start back at school. The amount of users globally and the percentages. I think it would make a nice one lesson intro to the price of progress (an IPC topic for year 6) on a global scale. What implications does this have? The children could then brainstorm the after effects of the impact this has on the local and wider international environments with an ecological angle as well as the socio-economic (not that we’d use this language!).

If your local area has access to computers and the internet (here in Vietnam it’s booming with an estimated 5 million in the southern area [HCMC]) then what does this mean? There are other factors to take into account; in Asia there is a darker side to internet use. The Gold farming from sites like WOW and the Linden doallars being transferred as real life dollars for characters and popular virtual niceties. But that’s another story.

In addition, I would hasten to add the impact of Internet cafes here in HCMC as a local factor to price of  progress that affects the social aspect of children. Many of the Internet cafes house children of the same age as those in my studentship who are studying this topic late into the night. What further implications does this have? Is there a gender issue attached? Is there a knock-on effect to the content they view? Is there a difference to the content they view/ interact with and the content they view – some may say no. It could also be a good grounding for my international students who are slightly detached from their surroundings due to their family’s wealth. It is startling sometimes as to how they are oblivious to the world outside of school. The more I think about this the more I want to kick this off in the new term.