ActivExpressions Flexing Their Muscles
Emma Leacy-Jones
Emma Leacy-Jones, one of the people integral in the development of the ActivExpressions, demonstrated this new functionality this afternoon at the Promethean booth. This new feature of Inspire will allow teachers to embed multiple questions on a flichart page. The groups of questions can include all question types and the teacher can define a difficulty level for each question. What happens when the teacher activates the question is that each student is sent a question and responds at their own pace. When a question is answered the result is sent back to the teacher and the next question is automatically sent to the ActivExpression.
By allowing the ActivExpressions to drive the assessment for each student, the teacher can monitor all the students’ progress from their desk while they are working on the assessment. The teacher can easily see what questions are being missed and, if they feel it appropriate, can even pause the assessment to reinforce a concept or explain something if there seems to be some confusion about a particular question.
ActivExpression
Of course teachers will still be able to view the results in a myriad of ways, and the results can still be exported. The ability is there to even set up parameters for their assessments as well. For example there could be a pool of questions at various difficulty levels and they can be randomized to discourage cheating. Furthermore students could have to answer a given number of questions correctly at one difficulty level before progressing to another, or the assessment could be set to include a predetermined number of questions at each difficulty level.
ActivInspire version 1.2 is in beta right now, but it is expected to be released this summer. The update will also require some updating to the firmware on Activhubs and the ActivExpressions.
Odessa Montour Tech Talk 
I look forward to this upgrade mainly for the reinstitution of the “search resources” option. When I first investigated the preliminary version of ActivInspire, I found the lack of a search option to be a major missing component. The vast majority of flipcharts I’ve made in the past were created using graphics, etc. found by searching the resources.
I also recommend that the tickertape be changed: I prefer not to have the character limitations now in place. I use the tickertape for so many things including speed reading of text. Please remove the cap on how lengthy text can be.
Bonnie I’ll go to the Promethean Planet forums post your comments about the tickertape length. I’ll also mention the desire to be able to change the colors of the elements in the tickertape and maybe allowing you to specify what tickertape to open when you use the tickertape action so you cauld change tickertapes on the fly. One of the things that I’m very big on with Promethean is how they listen to the teacher community. The forum is a great way to suggest things that may get fixed or added to the software.