Tuesday, December 4th, 2007...7:30 pm
Senteo Or TurningPoint
Which one would you choose?
Yesterday afternoon Elizabeth Cowan (fellow ESO) and I visited West Barns Primary School. West Barns are looking to purchase some handheld hardware that will compliment their Smart Boards. As you may know there are two main types of Interactive White Boards (IWB’s) that are used throughout classrooms in Scotland (Promethean and Smart). The applications/handheld devices that are compatible with Smart IWBs are Senteo and TurningPoint (links below).
During our visit today we were joined by Anne Johnstone from Steljes (Steljes is the company that distributes Smart boards).
Anne gave us a lively interactive presentation where she demonstrated how both applications function. Following discussion, West Barns Primary School have decided to trial the Senteo handsets for a period of time. Though I did not have a personal ‘favourite’ (as such) I would lean towards Senteo being more appropriate for the Primary sector and TurningPoint for Secondary.
I did scribble a few notes down during Anne’s presentation, but I think a better insight will be gained from the following websites
I would be very interested to hear from any staff who have been using either application.
On behalf of East Lothian, I would like to thank Anne for her time yesterday.
6 Comments
December 4th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
I would be interested to chat to you about this. I did some work on comparing Interactive Voting Systems a few years ago. Although Turning Point was not released at the time I did the evaluation I would be interested to get your opinion on it. For example does it allow text based answers? Does it have to be used with a Smartboard or does it also have a stand alone function? Does the software easily embed with PowerPoint and / or Keynote? Is it easy to export the quizzes that you generate and share them through a VLE? Can you keep adding to the system (eg: what are the total member of controllers you can add?) and how much does it cost for a class set?
December 4th, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Hi Ollie.
Right now I am not sure about answering all of your questions.
Certainly:
Text based answers- No
Stand alone function- No
(As far as I am aware)
However, I will certainly do my best to find out!
Tess
December 5th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
If you are interested in the relative pro’s and con’s of different voting systems it might be worth looking at the Falkirk Councils evaluation of a variety of systems on the market, the link is; http://www.qwizdom.co.uk/download.php?f=Falkirk.pdf
Should you wish to trial the Qwizdom system, the company is quite happy to supply loan kits for limited periods to schools in Scotland.
December 5th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Hi Tess,
Richard Neal here from Turning Technologies.
I need to clarify some facts as the above is not correct …at least now anyway.
We recently released TurningPoint 2008 (4th generation software) and the new XR ResponseCard.
TurningPoint 2008 does allow stand alone functionality. We call this TurningPoint AnyWhere (bundled with TurningPoint) which will allow users to poll using content in any PC application including web browsers, PDFs, Word documents, and more.
Other new functionality includes Plug and play hardware set-up, automatic creation of participant rosters with XR’s user stored data or have participants login to existing rosters, more reporting, Office 2007 support, supports negative point values and dynamic participant lists, to name a few.
The XR (see http://www.turningtechnologies.com/xr2008.cfm ) has a LCD, self paced testing model, text functionality, owner data area (to populate participant lists dynamically) + lots of other new stuff.
We will be at BETT in January with all new products. There is a number of other case studies. I will follow that up with our UK channel partner Steljes.
Kind regards
Rich
December 5th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
@Gary- Thanks for your link. I will check it out fully when I have time. I will put your offer to the team.
@Richard- Thank you for correcting me. I am not sure which model of TurningPoint we were shown. I am looking forward to find out more about your products and seeing them being used at BETT.I think you have answered Ollie’s questions.
Thanks,
Tess
December 5th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Thanks for that Tess
Does anyone know of a product which can be installed onto existing PC’s?
Ian
Leave a Reply