KZBlog

One of the things I’ve been trying to do as an educational consultant here is teach teachers to use technology, but in a smart way. I’ve become less of a fan of Smartboards or Active whiteboards here because they’ve been implemented in most classrooms like slightly more convenient projectors. The ability to use pens to make notes or click on the board is being largely ignored by a lot of teachers. And forget about giving students the pens to work on the boards themselves. Administrators tend to hate that. Not to be too disparaging. There’s a lot of potential with the technology and a lot of teachers are trying.

One area that I think has a lot of potential is using smartphones in the classroom. A lot of teachers have smartphones, whether they know it or not. iPhones and Android or Windows phones are expensive here, although very popular, but Nokia dominates the market and a lot of people don’t realize that their $200-300 Nokia phone has tons of functionality. You can go paperless by putting lesson plans and readings on the phone. There’s options to record voice and video, or assign students to record themselves at home. And I’ve been looking into some optoma projectors that will let you project images from your phone to the screen. You don’t need a computer in class at all.

Any other good implementations of technology in the classrooms here?