For a little over a year, I have been a fan of IdeaPaint. IdeaPaint is a dry erase paint that turns virtually any surface into an erasable canvas, giving you the space you need to collaborate, interact and fully explore your creativity. Popular for homes, businesses and schools, IdeaPaint opens up any surface to the possibility of becoming a platform for generating ideas.
This week, IdeaPaint ran a competition to win a kit of IdeaPaint CLEAR – a transparent paint to transform surfaces into an “erasable canvas”. The competition was in honor of National Bad Poetry Day and limited to the 140 characters of a tweet. In the wee hours of the morning, I composed my entry and today, discovered I had won! The poem is really bad – but it made my husband and the people at IdeaPaint chuckle – and won me and my students a Clear IdeaPaint kit – hooray!
So, what do with it? From the IdeaPaint website, they offer the following suggestions:
WHERE TO USE IDEAPAINT IN YOUR SCHOOL
- On your chalkboards – IdeaPaint lets you improve what you already have by transforming old blackboards into high performing dry erase surfaces that increase collaborative square footage, while eliminating the health risk of dust.
- On desks and tables – Any surface in your classroom is fair game, especially those that get a lot of 1-on-1 attention. Turn desks and tables into interactive surfaces that let students work through their ideas without wasting paper.
- On lockers – Newly painted lockers at the Kiel School in New Jersey have been a huge hit because they let students take ownership of their personal space and act as a message board for friends and teachers.
- In hallways – The hallway sees more foot traffic than anywhere, which makes them the ideal place to communicate with IdeaPaint. At the iSchool in NYC, painting the hallways increased students interactions and made an instant impression on visitors to the school.
- On doors – IdeaPaint turns anything into a message board. A coat of CLEAR can turn a door into a place to post schedules, assignments, while maintaing existing aesthetics!
- In offices – IdeaPaint has many applications outside of the classroom too. Use it to create a seamless think space where teachers and administrators can collaborate, or create a handful of smaller spaces that help maximize the area in your offices.
- Anywhere else! The truth is, IdeaPaint can be used on any smooth surface. Every time we see it in schools, there’s a new application – in cafeterias, to create story boards, even on the floor!
IdeaPaint has been used at many schools and colleges around the US and the World. One of those schools is MIT:
As I was looking through more of the work on the IdeaPaint website, I came across a combo IdeaPaint/Evernote innovation. I was excited having set my class up last year with Evernote and having planned to do the same this year. I love the ideas encompassed in this video:
The possibilities are endless and I can’t wait to explore them!
On behalf of my kids at Riverstone International School, thank you IdeaPaint!
sonya terborg 