“What are Those Orange Things?” and Other Silly Questions about Beacons in the Classroom

by Dennis Dawson

I was one of the backers of the crowd funding for the Beacons, so I have been using them in the classroom for a while. One of the first questions the students asked was, “What are those orange things on the board?” I used that as the gateway into the Rocketbook world with my students.

After explaining the Rocketbook app and process, we went back to the beacons. I asked my students to take two pictures of the board, one from an angle and one head on. The results differed from student to student but the results were similar. They ended up with a picture of a white board that was difficult to read.Then, I asked them to scan the board using the Beacons.

The responses ranged from, “Wow” and “Cool!” to “What the — How?” If any of my students were unimpressed, they were faking it really well.

I then challenged them to take a scan from the sharpest angle they could using the app. Surprise! The scan came out perfectly. There was no awkward text disappearing into the horizon.

“Why are you showing this to us?”

I have two large whiteboards in my classroom. One I use for the class agendas but I use the larger one at the front of the room for class discussions and student use. I’m encouraging the students to use the board as their own personal “group think space.” I compared it to the Google HQ and how they have white boards everywhere to help the ideas flow smoothly. The students are slowly taking ownership of the space, but the most notable example of students using the Beacons occured last week.

“Where are those triangle thingys?”

In my sophomore English class, we started Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in honor of Halloween. Immediately, the sophomores noticed the high number of unknown words in the story. One young lady asked if they could write them on the white board. Then, another student chimed in with, “Where are those triangle thingys?” The process took on a life of its own. Students went up to the board, en masse, and wrote down the vocabulary words they did not know. Then the other half of the group followed them and defined the words. At the end of class, I let the students use their phones to scan the board using the Beacons. We turned a 30 minute vocabulary exercise into a five minute “group think” on the white board. They were able to take all the definitions with them so they could finish analyzing the poem for homework and not be slowed down by the challenging vocabulary in the poem. My students are now trying to find any excuse to use the Beacons in the classroom.

“Can I use these things in other classes?”

I reached out to my peers and my physics buddy, Lukas Rieke, shared his Rocketbook and Beacon story.
“In class, I have students turn in all of their work on rocketbook paper/notebook/whiteboard with beacons. They have several choices: I print a certain amount of rocketbook paper each week, several students have purchased their own rocketbooks, and a few prefer to share the beacons and work on a section of whiteboard. Their work could be math for a physics problem, notes from a lecture, scratch work from a group problem or lab, or an actual lab report or solution to a group problem.

Personally, I use my rocketbook and beacons to share notes with students who missed class, send out examples of solutions of proofs to the entire class, or make my lecture notes or example problems scannable using the beacons on the whiteboard. Students can then save anything I write on the whiteboard. I also use my rocketbook for planning out lectures and videos or anything else a normal notebook would be used for. The Core has been especially useful for keeping track of monthly and weekly goals and deadlines.

My favorite application is obviously the “Rocketbook Hall of Fame” that has begun on one wall of my classroom, where students propose an idea for a hall of fame picture and then use the rocketbook beacons to scan themselves and then print and post their picture in the Rocketbook Hall of Fame.”

Rocketbook Team, thank you for coming up with innovative ideas and products. Keep the ideas flowing.

Dennis Dawson

Houston Christian High School

Houston, Texas