Sharptext and My New Interactive Whiteboard!
Some of you may have read this on my social media sites, but a very exciting thing happened this week in school- a brand new state of the art whiteboard screen was fitted in my classroom!
I only inherited my classroom in September, and the whiteboard and desk top were very slow and glitchy. The whiteboard seemed to have a mind of its own and would jump from smartboard mode to youtube and all sorts! It was like a gremlin was living in it! Needless to say it was extremely frustrating for me. In a mainstream classroom, you might just get away with having the children wait several minutes for the board to work or unfreeze, (unlikely though!) but I teach in an ASD class, where getting joint attention of all six children can be a challenge, and when you have their attention lessons need to be snappy and engaging! So the whiteboard was quickly becoming the bane of my life. Typically, another board in the school went at the same time as mine, and boards are very,very expensive! So we were waiting to hear back about a possible grant to help fund our board. In the mean time, I contacted Sharptext and spoke to the NICEST man I have come across in a long time. He was so understanding of our plight and offered us a FREE 55 inch screen! You can imagine my excitement at this point. Our principal then said the school would make up the difference to upgrade to a 65 inch screen, and it was installed this week! It has only been in a few days and I can already see the difference. The boys can actually write on the whiteboard now whereas before they couldn’t. They can use interactive games, we can change the font and background colour and line sizes for their writing, there’s so much it can do and I haven’t even had time yet to sit down and fully explore it!
I will attach a link here to their website. This is not a collaboration or a sponsorship or anything, just a genuinely lovely and generous business down in Cork who decided to give my class an amazing teaching tool which will make a huge difference to their learning. So if you do need a new whiteboard or anything else, give them a call, I think they deserve the business!