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…
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