St Peter’s Girls’ School all in on interactive screens

St Peter’s Girls’ School is a private Anglican and International Baccalaureate World School located in Stonyfell, 5km from Adelaide's CBD with about 900 students.

The school has embarked on building works and upgrades and a new Middle School with open, flexible learning spaces was designed with interactive display technology front of mind.

Having previously used Promethean interactive whiteboard technology, the school understood how successful front-of-class display was and 18 months before the Middle school building project was completed, the school set up a prototype classroom to evaluate the use of edtech.

Promethean helped the school design and develop the space by loaning technology and providing support and training, assisting the school to establish an optimal collaborative environment.

The school was focused on student agency and decentralising the classroom and the new building incorporated plenty of glass with transparent sliding doors subdivided or opened classrooms, encouraging large collaborative group work or for students to work alone or in small groups.

The chosen technology would also need to integrate smoothly with the school’s digital ecosystem, including Office 365’s Cloud suite.

Following consultation with staff and students, the school procured 22 Promethean ActivPanels for the Middle School classrooms and the common areas.

Melissa Bray, the school’s eLearning Integrator, explained: “The Promethean ActivPanels are a central feature of decentralising our Middle School classroom spaces. Two screens in each room not only allow students to consume content from anywhere in the room, the multi-touch integration enables groups to create content on each of the panels, annotate peer-generated or teaching artefacts and take the driver's seat in their learning.

“The ActivPanels facilitate teachers to capture learning easily, enabling them to curate interactive content within our learning management system. While the ActivPanels provide our teachers and learners with transformative tools, their usage is directly proportionate to the pedagogy employed within our classes,” she added.