I have been teaching for just over four years, and it has been my dream to have a PC with a projector in my classroom for all that time. I have developed an extensive intranet and website for both the schools I have taught in, using PowerPoint to present materials to pupils linked to worksheets and websites, but I always felt that was somewhat limited in its scope.

So when one of the Assistant Heads at Passmores offered to put a PC Projector in my classroom as a case study for the school in July of this year, I was easily convinced of the merits of the proposal!

My aim is simply to use facilities offered by applications such as PowerPoint and Word as well as the internet to stimulate my pupils and enhance their learning experience.

During my first week of having the system I was able to do the following things:

For the opening lesson I showed a video (opening credits of Star Trek Enterprise) inserted into a PowerPoint presentation. The students then had to put a set of stills from the film into the correct order on their worksheet. To check their order I used more slides in the same PowerPoint to make the pictures on the timeline appear in the correct order on the screen. Simple, but highly effective.
 

The title of the lesson was “Campaigning women of the 19th century”. The students work on a template sheet to analyse the life and work of 2 out of 15 19th century women campaigners such as Caroline Norton and Emmeline Pankhurst. They do their research using an A4 card biography produced by the department. I used the projector to put one of the biographies on the screen as a Word document and then modelled how to find the information by highlighting text.
 

The lesson involves looking at maps of Harlow in 1776, 1873 and 2002. The students have to look at each map and reach conclusion based on the details they give, before comparing the maps for changes. It is a pretty dull lesson, with lots of short questions.

However, the projector really allowed me to improve the lesson and get the students engaged. I scanned in the three maps so that I could talk about them and point at the large versions on the board. I also produced a short PowerPoint to start. I got maps of Harlow off the net and used a map site to zoom into Harlow from the country as a whole. I then put the maps on to individual PowerPoint slides as backgrounds. I used this set of maps to talk about what we could work out about Harlow from maps as a starting point to the lesson.

The students have to do five or six questions on the maps from 1776, 1873 and 2002. I put each of the sets of questions on slides, and used the Custom Animation function to make it possible to control the entry of the questions to the screen. This enabled the class to discuss each question and me to control the flow of the lesson more easily.
 

Internet

At Passmores we have a new departmental website and e-mail link that we are developing for students this year. As the PC connected to the projector is also connected to the net, I was able to show my classes the website and to talk them through its organisation. This made such a difference and elicited enough sufficiently impressed noises and comments to keep me going for the whole week!

With my Year 11s I used some of the Medicine Through Time Fling the teacher quizzes as lesson finishers when they had completed the work on Harlow. These were a massive hit, and resulted in some brilliant debate. The noisy ones who often seem to know very little really showed their stuff and it got a bit heated on a couple of occasions, especially when the ‘expert’ got it wrong!
 

Conclusions

The PC Projector or Interactive White Board is the future of the classroom. You can do so much that you have always done, but better. You can also do so much more. By controlling the flow of text or using a PowerPoint slide to put up a flow chart or spider diagram it is so much easier to explain ideas to students.

An internet connection linked to this gives the facility the real edge you need.

I have only had mine for one week at the moment, but I can see how it will change my classroom forever!
 

© Mr S Drew, 2002.  www.SchoolHistory.co.uk