SUCCESS STORIES

Teaching revolution in a local high school

Mikolaj Rej High School in Bielsko Biala

INTRODUCTION

Are you ready for remote teaching?

Mikolaj Rej High School in Bielsko Biala is one of the few schools in Poland that has introduced truly modern teaching solutions to their classrooms. The changes were brought about by a series of events that no one could have predicted – an unfortunate accident at the school, as well as, of course, the lockdown of March 2020. The school’s open-minded approach and willingness to embrace new solutions in this unprecedented situation enabled the smooth transition from traditional lessons to remote ones…accompanied by a surprising amount of satisfaction and success!

WHO ARE WE?

Education Re(j)start!

My name is Dorota Feodorów and I am the principal of Mikolaj Rej High School in Bielsko Biala. In addition to that, I am also a physics teacher. Creating a modern school happened by accident. Back in October of 2019 I broke my leg and for two months, I had to teach my classes remotely with the help of Google Classroom.

When the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit I was able to share my experience and newly acquired remote teaching skills with my fellow teachers. Using Google’s GSuite for Education, we were able to assess if our students had access to devices which were appropriate for online learning. We were also able to coordinate the communication flow between the teachers and parents.

After we had got the hang of the basics of educational computer technology we decided to take it a step further…

" In 2020 we were taught humility, and we understood that you can’t count on always being able to achieve your plans" Dorota Feodorów

" It was during one of these workshops that I became interested in Explain Everything. It turned out to be exactly the kind of digital whiteboard we needed. What’s more, its creators are from Poland!" Dorota Feodorów

CHALLENGE

Does this technology even make sense?

Thanks to the BBC material: “My Teacher is an App” I had become interested in the innovative teaching methods I discovered in Apple’s offer.

My eagerness to introduce these new solutions to our school was met with some level of skepticism from both teachers and parents. Will we be able to change our old habits? Will it be worth the additional expenses? Are there any cheaper solutions? Will we be able to properly use this technology?

In March 2020, we bought a few iPads for Science teachers. At the beginning of 2021, we received additional funding for devices for a larger group of teachers. It was then that we also began cooperating with Cortland, a company which helped us purchase iPads for our students and switch to a more innovative and modernized style of teaching.

It soon turned out that iPads alone would not be sufficient and that we were still missing the equivalent of a traditional whiteboard. We begin searching for an application which would allow us to transfer our traditional teaching methods to the digitized world. During a training session organized by Cortland we discovered the Explain Everything interactive whiteboard. And that’s how it started…

SOLUTION

The digital whiteboard for teaching, no matter the distance

Most of our teachers began using Explain Everything soon after and quickly became full-on enthusiasts. What’s more, they all declare that even after returning to in-person classes, they will continue to use this teaching solution in their classrooms. Why? A multimedia whiteboard offers them so many more possibilities than the basic, standard whiteboard they had always used, which they could only write on.

Explain Everything proved useful for:

Language and literature lessons – letting teachers prepare and conduct creative lessons packed full of multimedia, and enabling the archiving of materials for future school years.

Math – allowing teachers to draw and write on the whiteboard, create charts, go over homework, upload images from the internet, add a live web browser to the canvas or upload pages from a textbook.

Physics – allowing teachers to solve problems together with their students (remotely too!), record lessons (which proves incredibly useful when reviewing more complex lesson topics to solidify knowledge), access websites without exiting the whiteboard, as well as communicate with students directly through the whiteboard.

Geography – allowing teachers to browse the internet without exiting the canvas, providing them with easy and unlimited access to materials such as graphs and statistics (these materials are also accessible to the students, allowing them to manipulate content and pull up web and book pages straight to the whiteboard).

Take a look at these examples of our whiteboard lessons!

THE RESULT

A technology that stimulates student engagement

Nowadays, teachers have to work extra hard to keep their students’ attention. Lessons need to be engaging, and this is where computer technology comes into the picture. That’s why we are constantly working on implementing changes in our school to continue improving the way we work with iPads. Regardless of whether we are teaching remotely, in the classroom or in a hybrid model, we make sure our teachers don’t fall into a mundane lesson prepping routine. Our goal is to deliver truly enthralling lessons to our students using new applications, and we also want to educate our children on using new technology responsibly.

" Most of our teachers now conduct lessons with the help of Explain Everything. They’ve even declared that once they return to regular lessons in the classroom, they will continue to use it, just as one would use an interactive board. All this is possible thanks to iPads, Apple TVs and projectors – the sky is the limit!" Dorota Feodorów

Digital whiteboard for effective learning

This is how you can teach with Explain Everything

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