I’m the one that set the challenge and haven’t been able to keep it up over the last few weeks! Well, that’s not entirely true. I have kept up with my challenge of using my SMART Board in different ways each week, I just haven’t had the chance to site down and write about it. So, here is a bit about what has been happening in Room 14 with the SMART Board (in no specific order):
1. Video Player and Screen Capture
With my 4 Year 11s, I used the SMART Video. We watched a documentary in .avi format and using the Video player we were able to annotate different parts of the file. When using SMART Video player, just lifting the pen from the try stops the video and you can write on the frozen image. We did that and then, in order to save our annotations, we pressed the screen capture button and the image we had annotated were automatically put into a Notebook file. I exported the file with the screen captures into a PowerPoint and have uploaded it to Slideshare. My students can then access it online and review the questions they wrote on the files. Here is the PowerPoint, embedded from Slideshare:
2. Finding gallery items and using the timer
To make a seemingly ordinary activity a bit more fun, pull out the timer that’s in the Gallery and get the kids to beat the clock. I got some of my Grade 3 students to simply choose some pictures of food they eat from the gallery, but they had to beat the clock. I gave 4 students 3 minutes to each put up 2 pictures each. Just having that timer tick over added a competitive dimension to the activity.
3. Sharing websites
The SMART Board provides a great screen for showing websites and enabling the whole class to see (except in my room they need to be fairly close, as it’s a really long room!). Showing websites is not really ‘using’ the SMART Board (more on that in a later post) but it certainly makes it easy to immediately answer a question that someone asks. We were talking about the Great Wall keeping the ‘barbarians’ out in class one afternoon. One of the kids asked what a barbarian was and so I asked Google for the definition and was able to show it to the whole class. To take looking at websites on step further with the SMART Board, I’m going to use the highlight function.
4. Using SMART Recorder to immediately playback how to draw a character
I put the Recorder on as I was explaining to Grade 3 how to draw the characters for ‘you’ and ‘eat.’ Using the Recorder meant that I could play the video of how the characters are drawn a few times over as the kids were practicing them on their small whiteboards - the non-interactive kind!
One afternoon I got Grade 6 to write down some ideas they had about how they think we could use the SMART Board more effectively. Stay tuned for their answers…
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