A late kick-off to the year – with a fun new tool
Yes, it’s taken 3 months into this school year to update this blog. I have a couple posts in the hopper that I will have the best intentions of posting soon. My other hat, coordinating the IB Programme at Tri-County International Academy, has precluded some of my writing activities.
At just about the time we’re seeing a significant presence of SMARTboards (and its similar cousins) in the classroom, SMARTtech has released the SMARTtable, targeted at primary grades users. The SMARTtable uses multi-touch technology meaning that you (and even a helper) can interact with display at different points on the screen at the same time, as opposed to the single point like a mouse or marker. As the name implies, the surface is horizontal.
Before you start lobbying for one of these in your classroom, it’s important to note that not only is this a new technology that could probably use a little more time to be refined, it will also set you back about $8,000.
My intial take on this is that it has a lot of potential. Some of my favorite new gadgets on the market are those that include multi-touch – most notable among these is the iPhone and iPod touch (neither of which do I own). I expect some really exciting things from multi-touch in the nearer future. The interactive nature of this tool probably even exceeds the SMARTboard, which, despite its interactive reputation, still is really usable by only one person/finger/marker at a time.
The two tools are likely to develop in different directions, meaning that it would be useful to have both, but probably not economical. And despite its potentially high ranking on the “tech-toy appeal” scale, like all other educational technologies, one question still must be answered: How does this technology improve instructional practice?
