Charlestown School Uses IdeaPaint to Improve Collaboration
When chalk dust became a problem at the Warren-Prescott School in Charlestown MA, the school initially turned to melamine boards as a solution to resurface their chalkboards. The teachers found that after a short time, the surface became essentially unusable due to ghosting and poor performance. A parent who had seen IdeaPaint in action at the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club stepped in to advocate on behalf of the teachers to improve the classrooms. Within weeks, over 800 square-feet of IdeaPaint PRO had been installed across multiple classrooms to do away with the melamine boards and resurface the chalkboards underneath.
In the classroom of Scott Frost, an 8th-grade math and science teacher, IdeaPaint PRO was also used to resurface all the desks in the room, creating a unique and powerful learning environment for his students. We paid a visit to Mr. Frost's classroom to see how our product was performing, and were amazed by how he had incorporated IdeaPaint into his teaching process.
"As a traditional whiteboard medium," said Mr. Frost, "the IdeaPaint surface is a superior product. The marker color is clearer in both sharpness and color saturation. The colors pop off the surface, allowing more use of multiple colors in one presentation. This is especially valuable in math where you can solve or compare graphs in different colors. Clean up is also faster and easier. There is zero retention of pigment on the surface after wiping down with a damp cloth.
"The clear advantage in using IdeaPaint is the surface versatility. In my classroom all of the tables have an IdeaPaint surface. The impact on participation and learning was immediate. At the middle school level in an urban setting, the ability to engage students in learning is often a difficult task. The tables have been instrumental in fostering student engagement. Currently I have a student that until now has avoided most classroom work. The ability to write on the tables has brought this student into the classroom community. The student has demonstrated an understanding of moon phases and eclipses that would have eluded me before with their lack of previous classroom work. He now sees the table as a medium different from the traditional notebook and as a source of imagination, and this has somehow mollified his previous disengagement.
"Class wide, there is a greater sense of 'chance taking' with the tables that is tangible. Also, group collaboration is enhanced and the larger surface allows inter-group work to take place more easily. I can't explain why; it just happens. Once a few ground rules are covered, the students jump right into it and begin writing."
Learn more about how IdeaPaint is being used in schools.
See "before" and "after" photos on Flickr
