Betws Primary School was recently supplied with Visualisers from AVerMedia. The units were placed in Year 4, Year 5 and Year 6 classes with the focus of developing creative writing. Year 2 also had access to a Visualiser to aid with foundation phase teaching (Science – Materials, Handwriting – Pencil/Pen grip). The school is a ‘SMART’ school, and all visualisers were connected to a Smartboard. Using the Smartboard software, children’s work was regularly evaluated, annotated to show potential improvements, an image was taken and sent to individual desktops as a measure for improving work. This proved has extremely successful throughout the school.
Lessons
The visualisers were used in a cross-curricular fashion in all lessons. The Infant classes found it particularly useful in science tasks to magnify materials and in art to show and evaluate pupils work. Year 4 Teacher, Mrs Pearce, said ‘The visualiser is by far the best piece of kit in the classroom. I would have this over a whiteboard any day. It saves photocopying, and brilliant for scaffolding all types of tasks!’ she added.
Training and support was given directly from AVerMedia. This training was beneficial and very quickly the time-lapse function was put to good used in a Year 5 melting experiment.
Integration
The Visualiser was quickly integrated into teaching as it provided a powerful visual medium in all lessons. It was used in staff meetings (looking at policies and standardization of work). It has also been used to capture good work and aid with the compilation of a digital portfolio and ‘Assessment for Learning’.
What has been extremely popular about the visualiser is the ease of installation, and how it just simply fits into everyday teaching. ICT is integrated into all lessons, with little thought as the units are so straightforward to use. The pupils even get in on the act by using the device to show others their ideas, for peer evaluation, and also capture work to put in their own digital profiles on our school network.