Idea Paint

I recently learned of a cool new product called Idea Paint. I understand that it's not incredibly new, but I think it has some great uses.

If you haven't heard of this or seen this, check out this video:




This stuff is FANTASTIC! It really is. With this paint, you can turn tables and walls into dry erase boards. Imagine doing math right on the table! Drawing a graph and doing calculations right on the table's surface? What about actually having a word wall that's a real wall?

I know, "Marvin, this is wicked awesome, but how is it assistive technology?"

I think about students who are physically not able to access a regular white board or blackboard (yes, there are still a few of those out there). By painting a table with this material, they can write or draw on it. 

Recently, I was working with a teacher who was teaching her students about graphing coordinate systems and lines. You know, that (X,Y) stuff. We discussed options for her students with physical disabilities that keep them from being able to use the whiteboards in the classroom or the SMARTBoard in the front of the room to do graphing with the rest of the class. We looked at the idea of making one of the tables in the room a white board table by gluing affixing one of the white boards in storage to a table in the room so the students could graph on it.  We could make a coordinate system using permanent marker on the white board, so it wouldn't be erased as you used it, and then have the students to plot points with dry erase markers, checkers, pogs (yes, I said pogs), cars, whatever they wanted to use to represent those points. If you needed a line between two points, you could easily lay a yard stick or other straight edge on the table and draw the line with a dry erase marker. If we used the clear IdeaPaint, we could paint all of the tables in the classroom so that any table could be used. We could also paint the students desktops so they could graph on their own actual desktops. It just opens up a world of possibilities. 

You can check out their website at http://www.ideapaint.com/.

So if you're looking for a vertical whiteboard alternative, try some IdeaPaint and get horizontal!