Samsung visualisers in class of their own

It has been five years since Warren Junior School was chosen as one of nine schools in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham to participate in a Government backed £27million ICT Test Bed project to use technology to help raise teaching standards.

For Warren Junior School in Chadwell Heath, this meant the opportunity to invest £900,000 in equipping its sixteen classrooms and other teaching areas with the latest technology including laptops and plasma screens. Not all the equipment had to be purchased as the initiative was supported by various manufacturers and among the equipment donated were two Samsung Techwin visualisers.

Five years later, every classroom now has a visualiser and according to Headteacher, Gary Wilder, it would be hard for him and his teaching colleagues to imagine life without them. “The visualisers are an integral part of virtually every lesson and they act as the hub for all our other ICT based equipment, including our PCs, electronic writing slates and digital overhead projectors.”

Unlike many schools across the UK, Warren Junior School still does not have a single electronic whiteboard and has no intention of investing in them in the foreseeable future. We asked Mark Jobin, Head of ICT to explain why: “Our Borough decided not to take up the whiteboard option. Although prices are falling, they were, at the time, very expensive pieces of kit and my colleagues, quite rightly in my view, decided that with digital overhead projectors linked to computers and visualisers in every classroom, we simply did not need whiteboards. Okay, it’s nice to be able to manoeuvre data and information on a touch sensitive screen, but it’s not the be all and end all.In any event, the Borough felt that the positioning of whiteboards was not always practicable in that, wherever you might position a projector, there was always the inconvenience of children or teachers standing in front of the screen casting a shadow.

The benefits of visualisers

Mark adds: “Visualisers are probably the most versatile tool that teachers have in the classroom.They allow a teacher to take a child’s piece of work and instantly share it in 3D with the whole class. I use mine on a daily basis and in virtually every lesson. It is at its best in science lessons when lookin