Many of you are back to school this week after the long Christmas break, if you are not back already! Happy New Year to our partners, readers and customers. As we head into 2019, we thought we’d start the year with a general post of teachnology. As a company, we’ve visited many of our customers both new and “old” over these last few months of 2018. Treading steps on shiny school floors, impressively shiny classrooms and in one case, a beautiful new $50m school! For many of you, you are returning to new technology in the classroom that has been installed over the Holiday break. The first thing that I would say is don’t be scared.
Confidence
You should not be worried about the new technology in the classroom whether this is software or Hardware. You should embrace it! Being confident with the new “kit” we know takes time but you should do whatever you can to learn more about these new “tools” that you have been given. Most companies like us what to provide you with tools that can enhance what you are doing, not replace it.
Don’t Forget the Past.
The first thing that I say in the training sessions that I run is don’t forget the past and what you have been doing for many years in most cases. Company’s such as us at TouchIT Technologies don’t want to replace what you have been doing for many years. We are supplying both hardware and software that can perhaps enhance what you are doing or at least give you some new ways of doing things. I always use the lines in training sessions “just because you have a new shiny LED touchscreen in your classroom, don’t forget what you have been doing for all these years” New “kit” gives you new opportunities to do things, but should not replace what you have been doing.
Learn
Certainly at TouchIT Technologies, we go out of our way to provide you with the most comprehensive set of resources possible to enable you to get to grips with our product. Our online resources stretch from FAQs, to Video Tutorials, to Online Training, to Manuals and more. At TouchIT, we have a vested interest in getting you trained on the product so you are able to get the most out of it. Let’s face it, if you are using it, shouting about how great it is to your colleagues and peers, then we are going to sell more; so we have a vested interest.
Persevere
Let’s be honest here, however great a piece of software or hardware might be, however easy us manufacturers say it is, there is going to be a learning curve. You are going to have to invest some time and energy into learning it. My advice here is to persevere. Yes, easier said that done, but you must persevere. Like anything, perfection is not going to come overnight. At TouchIT Technologies, we are working hard to create tools that we believe can help you in the classroom. Tools that we believe can enhance the classroom experience for the students and ultimately aid the learning experience that you are providing.
Embrace the Updates
At TouchIT Technologies, we’ve been very busy over the holidays period with updates of our own. We have new updates to both the App Store and Contribute Cloud that are really worth mentioning and coming very soon!!
TouchIT App Store 2.0 – www.touchitappstore.com
We will be launching the TouchIT App Store 2.0. Version 1 was conceived almost 3 years ago now, not sure where that time went but the infrastructure that it was built on needed an overhaul. With the increase in Users and Apps, we needed to ensure that the architecture was rock solid for the platform so we have created 2.0 – If you have 1.0 installed, when 2.0 is launched you will see that there is only 1 App Available in the current store, this is the new 2.0 App Store. Download it, install it and then delete the old store. You will be able to use the same login credentials that you had previously. What is new in the 2.0 store is despite new servers and a new look, that those school districts that wish to have control over what Apps are available are now able to create school accounts where you can manually select the Apps that you want to be available to your teachers. Pretty cool huh!
Its coming very soon!
Contribute Cloud 2.0 – www.contribute.cloud
Contribute Cloud has also had a major overhaul which we have been working on for the last six months. Firstly, don’t worry, you won’t have to do a thing. Simply log into your account as usual and you will be presented with the new-look software. This is one of the major advantages of being cloud based.
Firstly, it works in the same way but has a different user interface. It may take a little bit of getting used to but it is certainly worth it with the whole experience being much faster and user friendly.
Those eagle-eyed amongst you will find the addition of a new set of “tools” that can be used in your workbooks. Calculators, Tally Counts, Periodic Table and many more can now be found on the right had side tab of the screen. We have also added support for multi-touch into the canvas so you can have multiple users at the LED at once.
Teachers are now able to cast back to the students so if you want to show them another website, or a piece of software, you are able to cast it to the student’s machines as well as broadcasting your video and audio – its pretty cool.
We’ll be sending it live very shortly.We have many more feature updates planned for 2019 so stay tuned.
Enjoy!
