On Thursday the 27th of November Melbourne Grammar hosted an evening with 2Touch. Among the evenings presenters where: 2Touch advocate and teacher, Scott Watkins, as well as 2Touch visionary, Pablo Garcia. The evening ranged in topic from: student collaboration, to capturing ideas, and even the intuitive nature of touch.
Teacher and 2Touch advocate, Scott, spoke about instantly recording and saving student ideas that come up during lessons. “It’s about capturing the genius that happens”. Scott also mentioned the need to “record the journey that the class goes through, ensuring that any of those miracle ideas are captured by 2Touch and stored”. By saving the “journey” it can then be revisited later on in the year, triggering memories, with a simple touch of the 2Touch board or what Scott called the “double click time machine”.
Scott also mentioned 2Touch’s ability to facilitate teachers attempting to engage students through speaking “the Generation Y language”. By capturing/annotating over the likes of YouTube and Google Earth you are using the technology and multimedia programmes that your students use everyday, instantly presenting the lesson with tools that they are very familiar with.
Pablo Garcia, one of the principal designers behind 2Touch, used his session to focus towards collaboration, looking closely at 2Touch as a shared surface from which students can gather around and exchange ideas. “It’s the right tools for the right teachers”, commented Pablo, “giving every student the chance to exchange ideas on the same shared surface and continually incorporating that into the lesson – that’s why 2Touch is a wonderful growth tool”.
With around 15 principals and HODs in attendance, the evening proved to be a useful insight into current school usage on, and beliefs towards, interactive whiteboards, as well as everyone benefiting in, what was to most, their first exposure to 2Touch.