In the lovely little Acadian village of Tracadie, New Brunswick today with the couple of dozen provincial technology mentors for our regular get together. This day will be spent training on SMART products, primarily SMART Boards and Notebook Software.
This morning we were given a brief splash of SMART’s newest product, the Senteo Interactive Response System by SMART rep Michael Ward. While SMART Boards continue to take schools by storm, SMART is also quickly developing a number of other tools that can have an impact in the classroom.
The Senteo system is certainly easy enough. It allows for teachers to manage their classroom, with the primary purpose to receive fedback from students on learning as instruction progresses. Quizzes can be pre-designed and developed or quickly done on the fly.
It certainly does look like an interesting tool, although I do have some concerns about the lower-level understandings it tends towards. Multiple choice and true/false quizzes may give a quick and dirty measure of group capture, but the trick will be to get teachers to move beyond this level of assessment.
Success in the 21st century will demand that students know more than content. Some of SMART’s other products lend themselves much more to higher level, creativity-based learning. All in all, a nice tool as a start, but we really need to move teachers and students into more higher-level learning.
Technorati tags: education, teaching, technology, Senteo, SMART Technologies
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