With this tool, teachers have very pretty data that tells them what kids do and don’t know. As the first part of the KWL, (what we do know, want to know, and what we learned) this has been proven valuable data. The kids love the remotes, the planning is easy, and the tool helps teachers focus their lesson plans on where the students need the most assistance.

I’m a wine salesman as well as a teacher, and I often find myself talking shop while ‘at work’ in the wine world. Recently, at a wine tasting, I was talking about the remotes, my new toys in my arcenal. The woman I was talking to asked me how much my new toy cost the school. When I told her, she snorted wine, shocked. She asked me why I haddn’t bought 25 small dry-erase boards, put them under my kids’ seats, and used the PowerPoint slides to the same ends. The data wouldn’t be as pretty, but it would be pretty clear when the kids wrote a letter and held up the boards simultaneously whether they knew their stuff or not. Seriously, I told her that she should quit what she was doing and become an educational consultant. It was brilliant, and it would save thousands. I asked, what did she do, anyway? She told me she was teaching in a school in Raleigh, where she had been teaching for fifteen years. And that’s the value of experience, I reckon.

-Shu