Thursday 24 April 2008

The IWB Challenge: Week 3

This has been a bit of a strange week, with our school feeling eerie and deserted due to the Teachers’ strike today. As a result, just like Jess McCulloch, I feel that I did not spend as much time trying things out with my Smartboard as much as I would have liked to.

On Monday, I used my Smartboard as usual with animated Powerpoint to present and reinforce new language. I played a new game with Y6, “Guess which item is going to go round and round”, which worked well and is a different take on “guess the next item to disappear”, with team competitions and extra points being given for correct guesses and pronunciation.

I also had a look at Ink Aware, the Smartboard Application recommended via Twitter by Lisa Thumann to amend my Powerpoints.

On Tuesday, I used this blog on the IWB to demonstrate “Word Magnets” at our Faculty meeting and introduced a colleague to the magic paper and the erase and reveal techniques so clearly demonstrated in the Rebbeca Duncan ‘s videos recommended by Jess last week

I got my Notebook training going, exchanging ideas and tips with my colleague. We looked at the Smartboard Gallery in order to select tools that could be useful to a language teacher. We selected the timer, interactive dice, the spinner, the scrolling banner and many more like the question and answer template.

I was also shown how to colour shapes on a different colour background and, last but not least, how Smartboard Notebook resources can be imported into Powerpoint presentations. I then decided to give up on my original idea to export our many powerpoints into notebook and replace it with my new plan: keeping the best features and ideas from our powerpoint presentations and importing links to more interactive Notebook activities into them. The types of Notebook activities I am currently considering will be drag and drop activities to start with.


I have also just noticed more training resources by Jose Picardo on his brilliant blog, Box of Tricks. My aim will now be to put at least 2 of these great ideas in practice for next week!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Isabelle,

Can you tell me more about or how to find some of the things you mentioned in this post i.e. the interative dice and the timer? I am always looking for things like this!

Isabelle Jones said...

Hi there Amy
They are in the Gallery part of the Smartboard Notebook, in essentials for educators and interactive and multimedia. The timer is good for classroom management too, to keep the pace going in lessons and also make students of time-wasting if need be.

Anonymous said...

I am really enjoying following your IWB project - thank you for sharing!