The Seven Wonders of the Whiteboard Challenge…

begins on Monday August 11th. There are seven challenges to complete, then blog about. Join up to the Interactive Whiteboards in the Classroom Diigo group, and favourite your blog posts there. whiteboardchallengeThe aim of the challenge to to create a group of teachers who have reflected on and created resources for using their interactive whiteboards – complete with reflections and tips for other teachers. If you are blogging about each challenge that you take part in (and you don’t have to do all seven unless you want to!) then you have helped to provide a resource that other teachers will find very valuable.

Each challenge will be presented to you in video or podcast form by an experienced whiteboard user. The presenter will show you what they have done, why they like doing it and how to do it yourself. You then have to go back to your classroom and take up the challenge of using it in your own way and then telling us all about it!

The Whiteboard Challenge Task Masters so far include myself, Chris Betcher, Lauren O’Grady, Ben Hazzard and Danny Nicholson. At the moment the challenges have not be written up, but they will all be ready to go by the time the challenge starts so that you can pick and choose which ones you want to participate in.

Find out more about the challenge and sign up on the wiki.

Audio Wordfind and Translation on the SMARTBoard

Here are a couple of short videos of how I’ve been using audio clips on the SMART Board lately. I’ll get back to my Weekly Whiteboard Workouts when I can.

For these activities I recorded words in Audacity and saved them as mp3s. I then simply added them to the gallery on the Notebook software.

If you are interested in SMART boards, you might like to join the SMARTBoard Revolution ning network.


Find more videos like this on SMART Board Revolution


Find more videos like this on SMART Board Revolution

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…

Ideas for Using the SMART Board from Grade 6

I asked my Grade 6 class to write down some ideas they had about how to use the SMART Board more effectively. Here is what they wrote:

SMART Board Ideas:

What We Like About the SMART Board

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