My Turn To Flip!

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WIWOW – Walk In Walk Out Wednesdays

As part of our ePlanks project, Anne and I have started a Wednesday afternoon session called Walk In Walk Out Wednesday. The idea is that staff can come in and ask for help with anything ICT related they like. Anne and I both often get asked to help people out with technical questions which we really don’t mind answering. But I found that people didn’t really want to seem like they were bothering us. Also, we had a staff meeting that talked about our future direction with ICT and it came out from a few people that they just didn’t know how to use things in order to get started and feel as though they were advancing their ICT skills. I remembered reading on Kim Cofino’s blog that at her school they had started having sessions where teachers could just come in and ask for help with whatever they needed and come and go as they pleased. I suggested this at our meeting and it seemed to be a popular idea.

We have had about 3 WIWOW sessions now and here are some examples of the things we have been asked to help with

how to:

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It seems to be working really well. We’ve had 3-6 people at each session. The ‘come and ask whatever you like’ approach works and hopefully it will continue to grow.

What does it mean to really use a SMART Board?

013 A few weeks ago I went to a local SMART Board ‘Support Group’ meeting in Warrnambool to learn more about how to use my SMART Board effectively. I went to the session on taking it a bit further and ended up showing teachers how to use SMART Recorder very quickly. Other teachers offered things they were using the SMART Board for and much of the discussion revolved around all the great interactive websites they use. My question is this:

If you are simply using a fun website on your SMART Board, is that really using the board?

The way these teachers were talking was as though that is what they mainly use their boards for – making cool websites even cooler by providing a big interactive surface for them. I am not saying that this is the wrong thing to do. There are many great websites out there that are greatly enhanced by being shown and used on an interactive whiteboard. I just don’t think that can be classed as ‘using’ an interactive whiteboard.

For me, ‘using’ a SMART Board means getting students to create something using Notebook software. It could be getting students to interact with resources that you have created in Notebook software or to use tools like the Recorder and Video player to add another dimension to your classroom activities. It means using things like the screen capture tool to take note of students work or the place mark they have left in Google Earth for example.  Or you could be reading and highlighting a website and use the screen capture tool to send it to a Notebook file.

I don’t think you can consider yourself to be an effective interactive whiteboard user if all you are doing is showing and using different websites. For me, there has to be another layer to it. Use the screen capture tool to record what the students have done on the websites. Highlight the website and annotate it. Record the students navigating their way through the website and speaking about what they are doing. Play it back for them using SMART Video player and annotate improvements they could make for next time.

But then, if you are using SMART Notebook on a PC, then there is nothing you can’t do with it that you can do with the interactive surface of the board. Everything is enhanced greatly by the interactive surface though, there is no doubt about that.

What do you think? Have I missed the point? What does ‘effectively using’ an interactive whiteboard mean to you?

Related posts:

Ideas for Using SMART Board from Grade 6

Weekly Whiteboard Workout 4 & 5

Whiteboard Challenge – Evaluation

At the start of April I declared the Whiteboard Challenge open. My aim was to use my interactive whiteboard in two new ways each week and then write about what I had done. For the first three weeks my posts were pretty regular, then I hit an extremely busy patch in my life (which has included moving house and being away for several days presenting and attending conferences and a few other things) and so I have written about the most recent three weeks in one post.

I declare that the challenge was a success – and not just for me, which I am very happy to report. Isabelle Jones and Helena Butterfield challenged themselves as well. I’ve just been reading over their challenge posts and they have got some great ideas that I’m going to explore over the next few weeks. There is so much out there! Also, I’m going to try to read these blogs more regularly:

The Whiteboard Blog

Teachers Love SMART Boards

and catch up on a few podcast lessons from Ben and Joan at The SMART Board Lessons Podcast.

What I’ve learnt from setting myself this task -

The most valuable thing was that I forced myself to discover and use new things on my SMART Board. I had to because I had to write about it! Well, I must admit that they things I did were not things I had NEVER done before, it’s just that they were things I had been meaning to get around to using and hadn’t. I really liked using SMART Video and annotating a video with my Year 11s (they did most of it) and then sending the screen capture of their annotation to a Notebook file. I’d love to use lots more video in my class and I think that is a great tool for interacting with video.

It’s been great to make myself think about using the SMART Board, but also to be actively on the lookout for resources and ideas from other people. I started an Interactive Whiteboards in the Classroom group on Diigo and quite a few people have joined and are sharing links.

I’m starting to think a bit more about what using a SMART Board really means. I’ve got a post coming out on that so I won’t go into it much here. 

The challenge is not over!

Not for me anyway. I’ll continue to write my Weekly Whiteboard Workouts and include whatever ideas I’ve had for that week. They may not be new each time, but build on variations of activities I have done before. I’ve just this week managed to download SMART Notebook 10 without any hassles and am having a great time exploring some of the new features. More on how I’m using that in the future weeks.

Now that the my challenge is officially finished, I think I might wander over to Jose Picardo’s blog and take up his Animoto Challenge. A few weeks late, but better late than never, right? I also feel like setting myself a bit of a podcasting challenge. Hmm, always more things to learn…

This is Jess McCulloch – Covering It Live!

As part of the weekly Oz NZ Educators meeting, I showed everyone what live blogging was about. You can hear me giving a bit of an introduction to it here:

Intro to Cover It Live

and see me give short intro here:

This video was taken by Joe Dale who was part of the Flash Meeting that we held.

Live blogging with CoverItLive lets you create a chatroom like atmosphere in a post on your blog. You can moderate all comments which makes it a very safe place for students to interact. The host of the blog can also play audio and video and add images for the audience to see. You can see our actual session in my last post. Here is a snap shot of what using CoverItLive looks like for the host. The blog post is in the middle (I took this shot when I was showing a video), the comments from readers com up on the right hand side and the media bar and all other tools (like setting up voting polls) are on the left hand side.

libveblogscreenshot

I have used CoverItLive with my Year 11 class a couple of times. My students really enjoyed it. We tried it once at school and once in the evening. Click here and here to read the live blog posts that we held.

I’m really keen to use CoverItLive and other tools that help my students to take their Chinese lessons outside the classroom. One of the frustrations of timetabling is that I have very little time with my students at any given year level and then when a sports day comes along, or I’m out for a PD or there are days off in general, lots of classes get missed. This is one way of holding class outside class hours. I’ve also held a couple of classes with my Year 11s on MSN Messenger which has worked really well. More on that later!

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