3 Things I Will Do

So often after a conference or PD session we are all enthused, inspired, passionate and more and then nothing ever happens with what we have learned, or the changes are insignificant. There are many reasons for that  -  we’re too busy and we forget, the momentum of the conference isn’t maintained as we aren’t around the same people, the people we work with don’t understand or don’t care about what you have learned etc.

The last session I attended at the Learning 2.008 conference in Shanghai was an informal discussion with Ewan McIntosh about lots of different things. Flickr was mentioned as was privacy, there was talk about social networks and Mac vs PC. Just before we left though, Ewan asked us to sit and write down three things we  will do after this conference. So, here are mine – I wrote 4.

I will;

1. Increase the amount of professional reading I do as much as I can – there is so much good stuff out there and I just don’t know enough.

2. Learn more about Alternate Reality and other gaming and think of ways to implement it next year

3. Be more active in my PLN – asking questions and engaging in discussions because, as I said in point 1 – I just don’t know enough.

4. Use Flickr more! Take more pics and actually upload them, and use all the different aspects of it.

Here I go, trying to keep the wheels in motion…

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.

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…

The Great IWB Challenge – It’s On!

At the start of last week I wrote a post called Me, a SMART Board and some language teaching: A Commitment and declared that April was indeed Interactive Whiteboard Month here at technoLOTE. I put the call out for anyone to take the challenge of coming up with two new ways to use their SMART Board (or other IWB) each week as well as a few other points. I was really pleased to have 3 people willing to take the challenge with me. They are: Isabelle Jones of My Languages, Helena Butterfield of The Langwitch Chronicles and Marie-France Perkins of Sans Problemes!

Each Wednesday I will post my ‘Wednesday Whiteboard Workout’ where I will write about how I’ve met the challenge this week. Isabelle wrote that she will post something similar on Fridays.

Before I write my ‘workout’ post (which is due today and it’s already 10:34 pm!) I will finish off this post by including something I wrote about IWBs lately. I was asked by a colleague to share some thoughts and here they are:

The two biggest advantages of teaching with an IWB are increased student engagement (because the students are all dying to get their hands on the board and are eager to watch anything that’s happening on it) and the ability to cater more effectively for kinaesthetic learners

Aspects of using an IWB such as the ability to show anything that’s on your computer to the whole class easily and add notes to whatever it is you or the students are demonstrating as well as being able to save students’ work and class notes / explanations straight away and use them for other classes are fantastic advantages but I think they are secondary to engagement and catering for different learning styles.

The IWB has allowed me to use more computer programs with my students that otherwise would not have been impossible to access, but not as easy. It’s fantastic to have a group of students playing a game or completing an online activity together on a big surface.

Having a whiteboard hasn’t changed my classroom in any physical way, but I do have the younger primary classes charging in and plonking themselves down right in front of it most lessons rather than taking seats at the tables. I’ve had to put a line of tape on the floor so that if I am the one standing at the board, they aren’t sitting on my feet!

My students love the IWB in my classroom. One of the shortcomings is that we only have one! I think an ideal situation would be to have one on each wall of the classroom to create a more group-centred learning environment. Unless you are careful, using an IWB can be a very teacher-centred event that allows only one or two students to have access at a time while others look on. I try to make IWB activities one of several activities that are happening in the classroom at any given time. As a language teacher, one of my favourite things to do with the IWB is to record myself saying single words, and then having the students drag these sound recordings into order to make a sentence as an audio translation activity.

Even though I know there is a lot more I can do with the IWB in my classroom and I am trying to find more innovative ways to use it, I can see that there are other teachers who simply don’t understand the potential of it. I have had on several occasions been asked to swap out of my room, or if my room is available so that a teacher can show a DVD. I have only been asked a couple of times to show other teachers what can actually be done on it. While an IWB is undoubtedly a fantastic screen for watching movies and DVDs on, not exploring its potential any further is wasting an incredible resource.

The IWB is not the be all and end all to integrating technology into the classroom, and it is not necessarily an essential tool to have, but for a place to present to a class and for a tool to engage students by encouraging the hands on aspect that so many students find important to their learning, then it is a fantastic resource.