The IWB Challenge: Week 4

I can’t believe this is the end of my challenge and also my 100th post on this blog. In some way, this is only the beginning…

On Monday, I used some simple Notebook drag and drop exercises with my Year 5 to get them to practise talking about time in Spanish. I also learnt how to use shapes as text boxes, fill them, group and lock them –while allowing move. I feel there is quite a lot of potential with the colour fill and the shapes as a way to highlight grammatical patterns from an early stage.

I have also been experimenting with the blind. My topic was clothes, so I set up a “What is in my wardrobe” activity. Students had to guess the item slowly revealed and we also played an alternative game where I flashed the whole content of the wardrobe to the students and they had to list as many as they could remember-in Spanish of course!. To make sure a team won, I made sure I was really strict with pronunciation and it was great to hear members of the different teams correct each other in order to win the game.

On Tuesday, I continued to exchange ideas and tips with my colleagues and this lead to Notebook 10 being installed onto our school network server. After enquiring about Notebook 10 new features on my Twitter network, I was referred to the magic pen feature presented by Danny Nicholson on his whiteboard blog and the Smartboard lesson podcast by Ben Hazzard. Some other features highlighted by Danny were object animation, page themes, magic pen, tables (and the cell shade), page animation and the new fill effects. I am still working on some of those, but it was a great start.

On Thursday, I also went ahead with idea of using powerpoint to structure the whole of my lesson and import links to bring in more interactive Notebook activities. Unfortunately, I was not able to upload those documents here as Scribd and docstoc do not recognise the Smartboard Notebook format.

My real find has been various shortcuts to import various parts of a Powerpoint presentation to make it possible for it to be manipulated on the board by students. For instance, I copied and pasted in Notebook the text from a slide and dragged part of it out of the text box, which duplicated it. I also found out that all the different labels or parts of a phrase could be locked simultaneously by using the control key, which saved me considerable time.

I then used the original box with the complete sentence/ paragraph to put in order and hid it using the white marker with the idea that I could start reveal the sentence to be put back together-by erasing the white marker ink- if students were starting to get stuck at a particular point.

As my board decided to freeze at that point, I changed my activity to get students to link the different parts of the sentences using the board markers. I also got somebody to time the students to add a little competitive element as the timer I had imported from the gallery had also frozen on that occasion… At the end of the lesson, the board revived and I was able to do a similar activity directly on the board. The erase and revealed effect worked well but next time, I will put the answer to be revealed in a shape to avoid searching for it with the eraser!!!

After reading about Helena Butterfield’s amazing second week, I am determined to try out Studiyo and Animoto.

The challenge is definitely still on…