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)