| Interactive Education often carry out Cluster demonstrations to a group of schools so that all departments can be represented and the teachers can bounce ideas off each other, as to how they would benefit from equipment such as the Genee Vision. Interactive Education was first introduced to St Michael’s RC Primary School at a cluster demonstration at Castle Croft School. Mr Griffiths the ICT Co-ordinator thought the Genee Vision was ‘brilliant’ after he saw the demonstration and could immediately see advantages of purchasing one for the Primary School as they had a child with visual impairment. |
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| St Michael’s were then able to secure funding assistance from Wolverhampton Local Education Authority’s visual impairment support unit, to purchase the Genee Vision. |
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| Initially the Genee vision was purchased mainly for a young student called Jessica who has visual impairment, she requires things to be enlarged for her to be able to view them and she also has problems with lighting and to wears tinted glasses to restrict the amount of bright light entering her eyes. |
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| The Genee Vision is a fantastic product that can really help students feel ‘part of the class’. In St Michael’s the Genee Vision is constantly used to enlarge and zoom in on resources, text and 3D objects. It can also help save money on photo-copying and enlarging as the visualiser can take a snap shot in seconds and it can be viewed via the projector or on a large interactive whiteboard or pull down screen with out the need to make lots of enlarged copies. |
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| The visualiser has been used mainly in the classroom for sharing resources such as text, homework and items for show and tell. The teachers and students told Interactive Education that they have been using the Genee Vision to demonstrate the modelling of simple circuits in science lessons and also to take a close up look at the axles on their model vehicles that they had made in CDT lessons. |
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| The Children at Michael’s were really impressed and excited about their new ICT equipment and they even went on to describe the freeze frame function as ‘magic’ they added ‘it allows us to share our work really easily’. It was nice to hear that the main use for the Genee Vision was sharing and working as a group “We all read together” the children told us and the teacher said ‘Every book now becomes a big book which is fantastic for those with visual impairments’. The unit was known as Jessica’s special machine and she told Interactive Education that it allowed her
to “see the same as everybody else.” |
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| To further enhance Jessica’s ability
to access the image being projected,
the laptop she normally uses in class has been configured to have remote desktop connection with the teacher’s laptop. This means that when the teacher uses the visualiser in conjunction with Video Capture software, thus allowing the use
of annotation tools from the SMART board, Jessica can view everything on her laptop enabling her to see demonstrations easily from anywhere in the classroom. |
