Get Inspired with ActivTips

Everyone using Promethean’s ActivClassroom suite of products is currently either evaluating their new Inspire software or jumping in and making the transition.  That’s a good thing because, in my opinion, Inspire makes lesson creation easier and faster than ever before.  To help everyone make the transition a little smoother, Promethean has added a number of new instructional videos to their great “ActivTips” feature.

Scott Caulfield

Anyone who attended New York’s first Interactive Whiteboard UserGroup our district hosted in May had the great fortune to see the keynote address by Promthean’s Scott Caulfield.  In addition to being wildly entertaining and informative, Scott is the man behind and the voice of the ActivTips videos.   Scott’s Inspire ActivTips videos, and currently there are two dozen of them, provide step-by-step walkthroughs of effective ways to get more out of the time teachers spend creating flipcharts.

Some of the Inspire videos to date include:

• How to use the camera tool to create magic in your flipcharts
• How to effectively include content and questions from other forms of digital media
• Using captions to make text appear when you hover over an object
• Tips for using and pre-setting the spotlight tools
• Using Inspire’s new Object Browser
• How to use the area outside your flipchart to store information
• How to drag and drop tools to flipchart pages to create action objects
• Using the paint bucket as an instructional tool

These videos are a great resource for anyone just getting started with their ActivBoard, or for those people that are very familiar with ActivStudio and are  making that transition to using Inspire.  Even for those people who are already at home with Inspire, Scott has a way of showing you things that you may have known where there, but he presents them in a way that will give you ideas to use some of the features of the software in ways that maybe you didn’t think of before.

That’s really one of the great strengths of the collaborative process with using this technology – everyone brings their own ideas on how to create lessons and when we start sharing the light comes on when we see how someone else has done something totally different that what we thought of ourselves.  I had the great please of spending some time with Scott when he was in the district of the user conference and he just has a great way of presenting this type of material with teachers and seeding people with great ideas – and he breaks it down so that anyone from novice to expert can understand what he’s talking about.

If you haven’t checked out the ActivTips section of Promethean Planet, head over to this link to take you directly to that section.  Check back often as there are new videos added to the video player on a pretty regular basis.  The videos are also available as a video podcast series for people who use iTunes.  If you’re a staff person at Odessa Montour, you can access all of Scott’s videos on our Safari Montage system by either searching on the keywork “ActivTips” or picking the “ActivTips” playlist that has been set up.  New videos will be added to Safari Montage as they are released.