Category: IWB

A long day but a great one.

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I feel very fortunate. It is a very rare opportunity to see an emergent technology that could have a huge impact on future teaching and learning.

On Monday I travelled to London to meet up with the Philips Entertaible team who I had met back in July of this year over in Eindhoven, Holland. It was great to see Maurice and Gerard again and to meet two more members of the Philips team. I was invited to take part in this workshop on education and help to draw out the possibilities of the Entertaible in my profession.

Facilitated by the company “What If?” we tried to get to grips with the possibilities. I must admit it was a great day! It was extremely different to the usual day I have and was quite intense – but being involved with such a raw technology at the very beginning of it’s life is inspiring.

It is very difficult to explain the technology other than what I said before.

From a teaching point of view though – imagine a simple counting or sorting activity on a normal table using counters and other physical resources.Then imagine the same learning activity produced on a IWB using digital versions of the counters or shapes plus the added multimedia benefits.

Now take those two ideas and combine them.

Not one nor the other but the best of both. Physical resources placed on a flat digital display that reacts to their location and presence!! The potential is staggeringly huge!
I left at 6:00am and got home at 10:45pm so it was a very long day but one that was a privilege to be involved with.

NCSL / SLICT Day

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Today we once again hosted headteachers taking part in the Strategic Leadership of ICT (SLICT) programme from the NCSL (National College for School Leadership). This will be about the 3rd year in a row we have hosted for the event. We had seven visitors with us this morning from different schools around the UK. We are always happy to welcome colleagues to our school, so that maybe they can learn from our experiences.

Much of today’s talk was centred on our development, over the last 3 years, of interactive whiteboards in each classroom and what strategic lessons we have learned from that process. But we did also begin to explore the “next big thing” – and we discussed how new technologies will be making an impact on what the future curriculum will look like.

I did give out this blog address, so if there are any of today’s visitors reading this I do hope that all went well with the rest of the day and the very best of luck with your future ICT plans.

We packed lots in today…

Google Earth, IWB, Mapping, Maths, My class, SMARTboardsPublished onLeave a Comment on We packed lots in today…

It has been a busy day for ICT in my classroom today – ususally is on a Tuesday as we have our time over in the ICT suite. Anyway I will try and explain everything we did.

Google Earth – Where are we today?
Did this slightly differently today as I explained to the children I had found the location of some people who had commented on our class blog. So I started looking down on the earth from afar and very slowly zoomed into Sydney and Canada respectively. We then looked closely at Sydney and loaded a 3D model of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge – we even zoomed onto the bridge and panned along it, on the model there are even tiny cars and bikes – I said to the kids it was a good way to start the day – driving along Sydney Harbour Bridge!
Mayomi
Used this great visual mindmapping tool/site today to explore what we had learned so far in our 2D Shape work. Really simple to use when combined with a IWB and wireless keyboard which I used today.

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Unfortunately there is no way to embed the map into your own site which would be great so I am going to explore whether I can hack some code to embed the mindmap into a wikispace.

RSS / Newsfeeds for Headlines
Just mentioned this today as we have been looking at newspapers and a journalistic style in our work. I had seen something on a blog before about it, but I just explained what RSS is and how we can get newsfeeds really easily. I think that it is very important to explore how different literacy and news is today – not just broadsheets and tabloids anymore, but a more fluid style of news that is much more personalised.

I just used the “Latest Headlines” bookmark on my Firefox toolbar to show them, we then just guessed from the headline what the news story was about.

Also briefly looked at Headline History which is cracking site I hope to use agin this year.

Quikmaps and our class Wikispace
I was a really happy bunny this afternoon as I knew that I had set my children a challenge, and they rose to it so well! Basically my Year 6 children had made a Quikmap (see previous post about the activity), powered by Google Maps, and then embedded the map into our class wikispace. It looks great! Take a look over on the history pages on our Wikispace. Scroll down and wait for the maps to load – don’t forget to click on the placemarks to see the work the children have done and why it is under History.
It also helped me to understand some of the practical problems that occur when you have lots of concurrent authors of the same space. Look out for some details soon.

Flickr and text types

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Today I asked some of my children to use a scanned example of a newspaper article in Flickr and add notes to it. Basically they were finding examples of language features that we have annotated in a more traditional way in their books. What I like about Flickr notes is the fact that there is still an unobstructed view even with annotations. I may continue this with text types throughout the year.
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Click on the picture to see the notes.

I asked individuals to work on this using the SMARTBoard – then I cascaded this down to others by asking the child who has just completed an annotation / Flickr note to explain how to do it with another cild and so on.

Thankyou to Highwood Infant School

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I spent most of today attending an INSET day at Highwood Player Infants School talking to them about using their IWBs which they have just had installed.

Many thanks to everyone at the school for inviting me and making me feel so welcome I hope that some of my ideas provide a springboard for your school’s IWB development.

Apart from the resources I planned to discuss we spoke about and used a range of other material. Below I have tried to record most of those thoughts from the morning:

  • Artrage 2 – a fantastic art package ideal for the use on the interactive whiteboard. Look out for more on this soon, here on my blog as I will be introducing the use at my school and planning some training.
  • Microsoft Local Live – we looked at the school and Highwood Player had really clear imagery from the “bird’s eye view” setting. Would be useful to look at before short walks or local area studies.
  • Quikmaps – Another mapping site that allows you to scribble and add placemarks. Again would be to look at before short walks or local area studies.
  • BBC Little Animal Activity Centre – we had a read of the animated books and phonic activities.
  • Google Earth – just mentioned this briefly but a wonderful tool that I am huge fan of. Read the rest of my blog for more information.
  • Topmarks Educational Website Search Engine – very handy when looking for something specifically aimed at schools.

Please follow the links above to the relevant sites.

Further down my blog, you will have to scroll a bit, there is the notes from the session with the links from the images. Please feel free to print these and use in school.

mswordNotes from session (handout)
mswordFerry Halim Guidance
vnd.ms powerpointPowerpoint of Year 2 Instructional writing work (ordering digital images)

I would really appreciate it you could take some time to leave me some feedback about the training session – scroll to the bottom of this post (or the one further down) and find the word “Comments” click on it and leave me your thoughts.

I really value your feedback and remarks so that in the future and can take them into account for other similar training sessions. Thanks again.