Porthcawl Primary School
Porthcawl Primary School in Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan represents a benchmark in making the most out of IT. Its pupils all benefit from the proactive, far-sighted approach of head teacher Andrew Wood and following a successful trial of AVerMedia’s Visualiser, the school is now installing one in every classroom.
Porthcawl Primary is a school with vision. It has 181 pupils (from nursery to Year Six), seven teachers and a strong determination to improve its status in the next six months. To achieve this Porthcawl works closely with its supportive LEA to introduce realistic new IT structures – it has already set a standard by being the first school in Bridgend to implement electronic registration.
“We believe in putting as many worthwhile IT systems in place as we can,” says Andrew Wood. “I was at an ‘Assessment for Learning’ training course in Cardiff, presented by one of the UK’s foremost authorities on assessment, Shirley Clark. She was talking about modern alternatives to acetate sheets and overhead projectors and mentioned a product that was easy to use, showed instant results and contributed to peer assessment. We had been looking into enhancing our assessment procedures at Porthcawl, though at the time I had no real idea how this next-generation technology worked or where to get it.”
Some months later it was Steljes, the technology pioneering organisation, that was able to shed a little more light on matters. Steljes is the exclusive distributor for AVerMedia in the UK and one of their products, the Visualiser was exactly what Andrew had been thinking about –a state-of-art document camera that promoted assessment and enhanced interactivity in the classroom.
“I was speaking with Steljes’s Education Consultant Luke Chaeter, who mentioned the Visualiser,” says Andrew. “Luke’s team helped to install a unit so we could see how well the children and staff got on with it. The results were remarkable. I introduced the Visualiser at a staff meeting – it took just minutes to explain how it linked between a laptop, a projector and an interactive whiteboard. We were able to explore all of the technical aspects very quickly and by the end of the meeting staff were making suggestions as to how they could use it.”
Andrew believes the Visualiser to be a great tool for training children to be more responsible for their work and highlighting strengths and weaknesses across the class. Old-style overhead projectors used to suffer from the delays involved with transferring documents to acetate. Now when a child produces good work, teachers are able to instantly show it off to the whole class as well as point out where they might have gone wrong.
“It used to be the case that student teachers had to learn very fast to catch up with how we do things,” says Andrew. “The Visualiser can really help them integrate more quickly – just the other day I saw a new teacher explaining line drawing artwork and using the system to demonstrate pictures from some of her favourite artists. The children were set a drawing task and then took it in turns to come to the front and put their drawings on the Visualiser. This sort of approach helps to bring clarity for the teacher and for the pupils.”
The cameras represented such a big hit that very soon the school was faced with a new problem – demand was outweighing supply. Andrew quickly ordered five more systems, enough for one in every classroom.
“They can represent so much more than just a camera,” explains Andrew. “We use them to make copies of pupil work, enlarge documents and images, and there is a sustainability factor too. We have been trying to move up from our existing portfolio to an e-portfolio and the Visualiser allows us to do just that. Apart from being more cost efficient, there is less printing so they are environmentally friendly, and because everything can be saved to the server, we conserve valuable storage space too.”
Next steps for the school include looking into the untapped potential of using Visualisers with some of the youngest children in the school. Andrew believes there are all sorts of opportunities for getting them more involved with shapes, text and models. By sparking off discussion in the classroom the children are able to take that important step forward of using language to describe what they see.
“We are already witnessing longer term results of teachers heightening involvement among pupils and big improvements in individual and peer assessment,” says Andrew. “We are always glad to pioneer new technology in our classrooms, especially systems as easy to use and valuable to our teaching standards as Visualisers. We can see a point where they become as much of an essential class tool as interactive whiteboards.”