Teaching your class how to use technology.. video camera's tape recorders etc? Try connecting the video camera to the projector and display the output on the white board. Kids quickly learn how to frame a picture and hold the camera still. How about making a pop video? Put the camera on a tripod and connect it to the projector as before. Use a karaoke machine with a couple of microphone stands you've got a functional t.v. studio. Now who wants to be the director?
An Interactive white board and LDC projector provides opportunities for students to access technology in a highly motivating way. It is our experience after using the equipment for over a year that kids learn quicker and retain more of the lesson when they have used the whiteboard. Start your lesson with a turn taking session on the board then let them loose on the computer and see for yourself how much they have remembered...
You can create your own simple assessment tools with Microsoft Powerpoint. Create a new slide and using 'Autoshapes' draw a circle in a primary colour. Drag the circle off the right side of the slide and drop it there. Set the 'Custom Animation' to 'Crawl from the left' and run your slide. The circle will move slowly from left to right. Switch off the lights and watch the students eye and head movements. Try different colours, shapes and sizes to determine which the student will look at and track. You can download a very simple example by clicking [here].
Clicker 3/4 can also be used to create some great interactive displays to support other areas of the curriculum. Make 'non sending' linked grids using clip art, symbols and photos the kids have taken with a digital camera to create their own interactive 'big books' for literacy work or how about getting them to document an educational visit or project for presentation at assembly, taking all the pictures and using 'sound recorder' to record the narration.
Interactive white boards add a whole new dimension to the use of art software. Freed from the cognitive load of having to use the mouse, kids creativity runs riot. Kids who would struggle to make even the simplest of pictures with a mouse, confidently choose colours and tools and produce quite complex patterns and pictures with hands and fingers.
In our school we use a programme called Dazzle which is totally configurable, allowing the teacher to choose which tools will be available on the toolbar. Colours can be chosen from a simple pallete of 8 up to a complex pallete of 255 and menu's can be turned off to discourage 'fiddling'. All of the settings can be saved as profiles and simply loaded in when the student returns to the computer. Teachers can choose from a wide variety of tools including basic shapes, fills, tinting and symmetry. You can also import clip art to use as 'stamps' so kids can still create pictures simply by touching the screen.
SOFTWARE:
Most interactive whiteboards come with some bundled software, which is usually designed as a presentation tool for the business market. Check out the software that came with your board. Smart Technologies software allows users to draw or write on the board using different coloured 'virtual' stylus or even the student's fingers. Perfect for early mark making and you can print out or save the results to the computer for your records and don't forget the 'virtual' eraser, our kids fight over who gets to clean the board!. Some bundled software incorporate quite advanced letter recognition systems so kids can practice writing and have the computer 'magically' convert their writing into proper editable text.
PRACTICAL ISSUES:
Interactive whiteboards are not the province of the ICT department, no matter what your ICT co-ordinator tells you. Interactive whiteboards can be used anywhere with video cameras or players and will happily connect to any computer providing the software has been installed. Most boards can be fitted to a moveable stand enabling you to push it wherever it is needed in school (and allowing access to kids in wheel chairs!). Don't fasten it to the wall in the ICT room, you will regret it later. I can hear the arguments already!, "there will be cables everywhere...", "the kids will fiddle with it...". Well... Tape the cables to the floor using gaffer tape so no-one can trip over them and teach the kids how to load the software and calibrate the screen getting them to count the points as they touch them. LCD projectors are relatively robust these days, ours was once launched across the room by a student testing it's aerodynamic properties! Three out of ten for the landing but ten out of ten for surviving the flight.
OK, so you've got it in your classroom, its all plugged in and calibrated... What now!
