What you can do in a week with a Visualiser!
Halswell School explore the latest feature of the F50 Visualiser - OCR (text recognition) and TTS
(Text to Speech)
Teacher Nicki Tempero and her year
3/4 students won an F50 visualiser in
an Interface Magazine competition.
Upon receipt they immediately set to
work exploring its potential. They
were given a week to report back on
the newest visualiser features.
Simon Hubble, Sitech Systems NZ South Island rep presents
the visualiser to the winning students.
OCR - Text Recognition
They began with OCR which digitises text placed
under the visualiser. Nicki said, “It is an exciting new
tool. I can see many benefits for the children and
teacher.” She described how the class had captured
text from a book and imported it into their IWB
software to make interactive activities such as
prediction, inference and decoding as well as close
and drag and drop tasks associated with reading and
maths. The class talked excitedly of what they are
going to do next: “Our next step will be to capture
and manipulate the text from reading books for note
taking, rewriting and creating exciting collaborative
activities.”
TTS - Text to Speech
Text To Speech has become the children’s favourite tool. Nicki described how during their literacy times the
visualiser has been in high demand for listening to reading books. She can also see this as being valuable for those
readers who have trouble with decoding and fluency. They are now able to quickly and easily pop their book under
the visualiser.
Quality optical zoom and one button recording
Whether it’s during maths, reading or theme, the optical zoom and one button recording have quickly become a
must have for “just in time” teaching moments. Ways the children have been using in the past week have been·
Recording children proof reading their written stories – saved ready for 3 way conferences
·
Taking a partial snapshot of a photo for making predictions during reading
·
Recoding children manipulating maths equipment to solve problems
·
Sharing picture books
·
News – some children have been coming to school early to set up the visualiser to share their news
Flipped Classroom
Implementing the visualiser quickly became a
fantastic example of flipped teaching in my
room. A small group of children began setting
it up and then were given time to explore the
software. After a couple of sessions and a
quick call to our sales rep they were ready to
teach others, myself and the Principal
included.
Quick phone call to Sitech!
Halswell School’s Principal, Bruce Topham, has
been impressed with the ease with which the
children have learned to use the visualiser
effectively and then teach others. As our
school adopts a “Modern Learning
Environment” approach where student-led
learning is a priority this could be a very
valuable flipped classroom activity.
The Principal is shown how the visualiser works
The conclusion - one week in:
The two main benefits, after only a week, have been higher levels of engagement from the children when
demonstrating a skill or showing a maths strategy and the problem solving and discussion that have occurred
whilst on task.
A huge thank you to Halswell School for sharing their first impressions of the F50 visualiser with us. You can watch four short
videos of the above activities as they happened here www.sitech.co.nz/visualisers or look back over their learning journey here
http://www.9plus10.blogspot.co.nz/