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.

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…

Weekly Whiteboard Workout – 4 and 5!

I’m the one that set the challenge and haven’t been able to keep it up over the last few weeks! Well, that’s not entirely true. I have kept up with my challenge of using my SMART Board in different ways each week, I just haven’t had the chance to site down and write about it. So, here is a bit about what has been happening in Room 14 with the SMART Board (in no specific order):

1. Video Player and Screen Capture

With my 4 Year 11s, I used the SMART Video. We watched a documentary in .avi format and using the Video player we were able to annotate different parts of the file. When using SMART Video player, just lifting the pen from the try stops the video and you can write on the frozen image. We did that and then, in order to save our annotations, we pressed the screen capture button and the image we had annotated were automatically put into a Notebook file. I exported the file with the screen captures into a PowerPoint and have uploaded it to Slideshare. My students can then access it online and review the questions they wrote on the files. Here is the PowerPoint, embedded from Slideshare:

2. Finding gallery items and using the timer

To make a seemingly ordinary activity a bit more fun, pull out the timer that’s in the Gallery and get the kids to beat the clock. I got some of my Grade 3 students to simply choose some pictures of food they eat from the gallery, but they had to beat the clock. I gave 4 students 3 minutes to each put up 2 pictures each. Just having that timer tick over added a competitive dimension to the activity.

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3. Sharing websites

The SMART Board provides a great screen for showing websites and enabling the whole class to see (except in my room they need to be fairly close, as it’s a really long room!). Showing websites is not really ‘using’ the SMART Board (more on that in a later post) but it certainly makes it easy to immediately answer a question that someone asks. We were talking about the Great Wall keeping the ‘barbarians’ out in class one afternoon. One of the kids asked what a barbarian was and so I asked Google for the definition and was able to show it to the whole class. To take looking at websites on step further with the SMART Board, I’m going to use the highlight function.

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4. Using SMART Recorder to immediately playback how to draw a character

I put the Recorder on as I was explaining to Grade 3 how to draw the characters for ‘you’ and ‘eat.’ Using the Recorder meant that I could play the video of how the characters are drawn a few times over as the kids were practicing them on their small whiteboards – the non-interactive kind!

One afternoon I got Grade 6 to write down some ideas they had about how they think we could use the SMART Board more effectively. Stay tuned for their answers…

Related posts:

Weekly Whiteboard Workout

Weekly Whiteboard Workout 2

Weekly Whiteboard Workout 3

Weekly Whiteboard Workout 3 – Spinning the World

Here we got for the next installment as part of the IWB Challenge. this week has been a little bit insane and I’ve barely been in the classroom. Monday was my only full day this week (with a strike day, China program meeting day and project planning day) and so I have not spent much time with the SMART Board. I still have got two things to report on though, so let’s get to it:

1. As I mentioned last week, I introduced my students to Google Earth via the SMART Board. On Tuesday afternoon I had grade 2 and seeing as half of them (there are only 12 in the class – fabulous) got to have a go at ’spinning to world’ last week, the other half wanted to have their turn. So, that’s what we did, and here is a video of some of our tour. We started off at our school which you can see if you look closely enough :-) The kids love getting up close to the earth and they love ‘throwing it’ as you can see them doing here:

So far we have just been feeling our way around Google Earth and even though we have checked out some key places in China, we haven’t really used it as an integral part of a learning activity, so I’m keeping it in mind to do that.

2. The second way I used the board this week was not by getting the kids to produce something, but by using the SMART Recorder to make two videos to introduce the characters for ‘you’ and ‘me’ to the students. I have put these videos on the Video Lessons page of technoChinese, our class blog and the kids can watch them, and then create a recording of their own so I can see their attempt at writing characters. Some of my students watched these videos on the SMART Board itself, while others watched on the PCs in the classroom. SMART Notebook software is installed on all of the computers in my room, so my students could create their recordings without having to use the SMART Board itself. Here is one of the videos I made. Watch here to learn how to read and write the Chinese character for ‘you.’

Next week I’d really like to use SMART Video Player to its full potential and create some interactive activities that promote deeper thinking about Chinese characters. I want to model these activities and then get the students to create their own interactive lessons for other classes.

Related posts:

Weekly Whiteboard Workout 2

Wednesday Whiteboard Workout

SMART Board Ideas Videos

The Great IWB Challenge – it’s on!

Me, a SMART Board, and some language teaching – a commitment

Wednesday Whiteboard Workout

Here is my first whiteboard challenge workout post! Since last Wednesday this is how I have used and thought about my SMART Board:

1. I got Grade 2 students to record themselves saying the names of the Chinese Olympic mascots (you can read / hear this post here on technoChinese) using Audacity. The fact that Audacity is so clearly displayed on the big SMART Board screen is fabulous because the kids just love watching how they can make the ‘blue’ in Audacity get bigger and smaller with their voices. They love watching the playback too. This particular activity – recording voices and watching as well as listening to the recording, is certainly something that can be done on any computer, but is enhanced greatly by the SMART Board.

Here is a photo of that activity:

2. Today the two Year 11 students that made it to class (there are normally four of them) tested each other by writing up jumbled sentences and then dragging the characters back into order. I’ll have to do this with them much more often as they really enjoyed it. There’s tomorrow’s lesson planned! :-)

Here is a link short video on Teacher Tube of part of that activity. Normally I would include the video in this post, but am having trouble getting it to work with the upgrade of Wordpress, which is the blogging platform I use.

3. Other things I’ve done with the board this week are simply to show some videos I downloaded from You Tube and to play a story I record through iTunes. I’m not really keen to count ‘watching a movie’ as a way of using an interactive whiteboard. Even though it’s a great platform to use for that, if that’s all teacher does with the IWB then the point of it is totally lost. It’s so much more than a movie screen.

We can do better than this (but I’m not saying don’t do this just don’t let it be the only thing you do!):

and this: (although the SMART Board does offer a great view for teaching students how to navigate around programs like iTunes, but in this instance I was the only one using it).

With my older students it was easy to take a backseat and let them run with the activity of the board, but with the younger ones, it’s harder to do that of course, due to the fact there are more of them and they would climb over each other to get at the board given half a chance! I did try to stay seated to the side as much as I could though and use the wireless mouse to help them out.

So, that’s it for this time. More on whiteboards next Wednesday! Don’t forget to look out for Isabelle’s whiteboard post to see what she’s up to…