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. The 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

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.

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

SMART Board Ideas Videos

I found these two videos last week just before I went to a SMART Board support meeting. They are by Rebecca Duncan who teaches in Perth. I think they are both great little ideas for getting the most out of SMART Notebook:

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…