Multi-window for student engagement
According to The Glossary of Education Reform, student engagement:
“refers to the degree of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that students show when they are learning or being taught, which extends to the level of motivation they have to learn and progress in their education.”
As teachers, we cannot always change our content to increase student optimism or passion for our subject, so we must get creative with the delivery of the curriculum. Interactive panels have proven to increase student attention and engagement, and the Promethean ActivPanel is an industry leader in innovation and brilliance.
The multi-window feature on the Promethean ActivPanel (Titanium and Cobalt) allows you to fully engage students with multimedia content. It brings learning alive for students and allows for meaningful and interactive lessons. The ActivPanel allows up to four windows to be displayed simultaneously.
Let’s get some ideas
Imagine your students are studying volcanos and there is footage of an active eruption on a website via video. Think about how you can actively engage your students in a way that involves more than just watching the footage, taking notes, or answering questions on a worksheet or interactive slide deck. The entire group of students can be actively involved and engaged in a group discussion with one another rather than doing a solo assignment.
With the Multi-Window feature on the ActivPanel, the students could be viewing the footage on the left side, while the infinite surface of the Whiteboard App is used on the right for the recording of insights and observations.
In this scenario, the dictation is happening simultaneously with the viewing of the rich content video. There is no gap between the experiential input from the video and the student’s thoughts. As the teacher, you can guide your students to making authentic connections by open-ended questioning during initial student discovery. What a tremendous way to pique student interest and curiosity for any curricular content.
Or…
How do you edit writing? You could possibly bring it up on our connected document camera. The downside is that this requires shuffling papers under the camera, and likely, the camera requires frequent refocusing. This practice does not allow you to make the most of your precious instructional time.
However, modeling editing is a breeze when you bring up the writing sample, perhaps in PDF form or directly from your cloud storage (Google Drive or OneDrive) on one window, and the Whiteboard app on another.
Suddenly, during the editing process, the students have trouble recalling a certain writing concept, and you found a perfect video on YouTube as a short mini-lesson. No need to close out of the work, just bring it up and open it in a third window. Now, you can look at the original writing, watch the short video on powerful verbs (or other concepts needed), and edit the paper all on one ActivPanel screen.
This feature allows for amazing teachable moment pivots or well-planned multi-media lessons to keep the learning alive. The Promethean ActivPanel sparks creativity and innovation in both you and your students.
Let’s make it happen
Multi-window is easy to accomplish by using the buttons at the bottom of apps enabled with this feature.
- Open the window or application you wish to display with multi-window
- Docking left or right fixes that window in place as half the screen
- Floating allows the window to be moved around the ActivPanel screen
- After tapping the float button, resize windows if more than two are desired
- Up to four different windows can be displayed simultaneously
- Easily minimize or close any window
Watch this video to deepen your understanding of the multi-window feature on the ActivPanel:
