Well, the school's Governing Council has given the go-ahead for the purchase of and installation of six more ActivBoards in our classrooms to go with the six that were installed in August. I presented the plans to my colleagues a few weks back and stated that we (the ICT committee and leadership) were after expressions of interest for the next rollout and that attendance at a Professional Development session would be the way to go. So, that ball is in my court but I have extremely busy and found it hard to put together the sort of information session I might have liked to - sort of a mini-keynote that explained the basics and let people know what they were in for. I started a Powerpointesque flipchart presentation to cover what I thought all the essentials might be - hooking things up, using the tools, planning the first lessons but then I thought, "How will I know that all of this is hitting the mark?"
Then it was obvious, turn the direction over to the stakeholders! I thought back to my presentation to the School Council where I just showed the council members "stuff they wanted to know" and the overwhelmingly positive feedback I got back as a result. Now I'd hope that teachers would be a bit more critical than parents and not be as swayed by the wow factor but why not let drive my session. That's not me copping out as I still have to demonstrate, answer the questions, make notes for future reference but this way, the group are guaranteed to walk away satisfied that they got something personally worthwhile out of the hour. So I've designed a quick and simple Word document (could have easily been done in Open Office as well) that can be downloaded here to view.

It gives them space to identify 5 things they want to know (How do you save a flipchart? How do you add backgrounds? How do you create counters for a game?) and then I use the IWB to log their answers in a mind map, drag them into broadish categories and go from there. I then demonstrate the board's possibilities all while sorting the participants' needs. I think I'm on the right track - I'll post tomorrow night on the outcome.