Dress the Snowman

A quick plug for my rather festive drag and drop activity to Dress the Snowman.

I also produced a Xmas Matching Pairs game.

IWB and Learning Research

Thanks to the NAACE mailing list yesterday I was made aware of some more research into IWB's being undertaken by Cambridgeshire County Council into the use of IWB's in the Primary Classroom.

Only the first phase has been carried out yet, looking at the patterns of interactions when the teacher is leading sections of the lesson using an IWB. There are lesson observations of Literacy, Numeracy and History lessons with reflection on each.

The study is not yet complete, there is a phase 2 yet to come, but it will be interesting to come back later and see what the finished study finds.

You can find the research here.

A real world desktop

A colleague shared this link to Bumptop with me last night (thanks Paul!). It's a ''real world' desktop interface where you can spread files around on a 3d desktop environment that models how we spread files around on our real desks.

It's an interesting idea, and with the lassooing and gestures I could see this working well with an IWB or tablet.

I'm a little concerned about just how busy the desktop would get - given the large number of files I have. I wonder if each ''desktop'' would be a different folder to streamline things. Also there's a reason I can't find that much on my desk, I have stuff all over the place. I do much rather prefer the rigid structure of a file directory, it does make it so much easier to find files that I am looking for.

You can see a video of the desktop in operation below and sign up to be considered for beta testing of bumptop at www.bumptop.com.

Clipbank

As well as being an Interactive Whiteboard trainer for Smart/Steljes I also train for other educational companies. One of those is Espresso, which for those that don't know is an excellent library of video clips, news articles and Flash activities for Primary Schools. I have been training for them for about 18months and I love the product. The quality of the videos is very good and Espresso quite deservedly won a BAFTA last month.

So I was very interested to see their secondary product, Clipbank, today at a session designed to get us up to speed with the product to be able to deliver training to schools next year as they buy into it.

Espresso acquired Channel 4 Learning earlier in the year, and Clipbank was one of the products they inherited. They've spent a lot of time tweaking the product to be delivered on a server in-school in the same way as Espresso and the new-look version will be on-show at Bett next month.

Like Espresso you get a very simple user-interface that gives easy access to a wealth of video clips (currently over 2000 clips) for 8 subjects. The quality of the clips is excellent, as you would expect for a company with their media experience.

The potential for using resources like Espresso and Clipbank on the IWB is huge. It means teachers can use short video clips to introduce a lesson or as a way of summarising the main points. Whiteboard tools such as the camera can be used to grab screenshots from the video and bring into the IWB software for annotation. A sequence of screenshots could even be taken and then used as a sequencing activity.

So a great resource, and I look forward to getting stuck in delivering training in Clipbank next year.

The other excitement from the day came from the fact that Espresso headquarters is at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. This is also a working TV studio where the likes of Doctor Who and TFI Friday were filmed. Today they just happened to be filming the Top of the Pops Xmas Special. Apparently the likes of Girls Aloud and the Kaiser Chiefs were in the building. There were huge bouncers on the door and paparazzi hanging around outside. I did see quite a few hairy types carrying guitars and stuff wandering around the canteen but if they were famous I didn't recognise them. It is definitely a sign that I am getting old(er) in that I wouldn't recognise a Kaiser Chief if it came up and kicked me in the backside.... I know their songs but couldn't point one out in a line up.

The Proclaimers were also there apparently, and I'd have much more chance of spotting them, had I managed to see one.

But I didn't. Which was a shame.

Whiteboards on Teachers TV

If you haven't already been there, you can access videos from Teachers TV via the magic of the Internet. I must admit it is somewhere I keep forgetting to access but it has a wealth of ideas for teachers.

If you do a search for Whiteboards you will get a whole host of programmes that have been produced to show good practice for using Interactive Whiteboards in the classroom for a range of subjects.

For example here is a 15 minute video that gives you some Top Tips for using an interactive whiteboard.

Not all of the videos on Teachers TV are available to visitors outside the UK due to copyright issues, but hopefully there is still enough there for overseas visitors to see how we are using IWB's over here.

Smart Activity Toolkit

The Smart Activity Toolkit has been available in Beta for a while now, but I am constantly meeting people who haven't heard of it.

For those who haven't seen it, its a bank of Flash-based widgets that are placed in your Smart Gallery. These widgets can be dragged onto your Smart Notebook page and then adapted to make your own interactive resources.

These include drag and drop labelling tasks, games of Hangman (or splat the teacher), sorting activities etc. Each one can be edited and the changes saved within the Notebook file.

You can download the Toolkit Beta from the Smart website here. And keep an eye out for the full release next year which has even more new features.

I must admit I haven't got many examples of its use on my own website, I must sit down sometime and produce some sample files. But Jim Birney of Fife Education has some good examples for Science on his site.

The Elements Song

Well, if I am going to be posting a blog about Interactive Whiteboards I had better post one of my favourite resources ever.

I show this resource whenever I do a Science IWB training day to teachers. I never get sick of it.

It uses the Tom Lehrer ''Periodic Table'' tune, but has a very cool flash animation too. It's always great to start the session with a song....

To view the Elements Song, click here.

Common Whiteboard Format

It's interesting to see that Becta are trying to revive their drive to get a common whiteboard format. You can see the call for consultation here.

I seem to remember them trying this a few years back with the launch of the National Whiteboard Network, but they couldn't get the 'Big 2' of Smart and Promethean to agree to share. I get the impression that Promethean see their resources as their big selling point and so don't want users of other boards to be able to just load them up. Which is a shame.

I really feel for teachers who work in schools that have bought both boards and have to plan what classroom they are doing their lesson in so that they can make the flipchart or notebook file in the corresponding format. You can see why so many fall back on using powerpoint.

Personally, I am waiting on the day that Microsoft realise that they only need to add a few tweaks to the way PowerPoint actually works to turn it into proper Interactive Whiteboard software. The ability to work on slides while in "presentation" mode with images, capture etc and it would be something to rival ActivStudio and SmartNotebook. But for now it's not there yet.

I'm also interested to see what comes of the Open Source IWB software project although it seems to be very much in the planning stages just yet.

Some generic software would also help those users of boards that, quite frankly, have awful software such as the Hitachi / Cambridge boards. I have had to train on these and the software is very unfriendly, and trying to do anything that you can do really quickly on Smart/Promethean is a real trial. Even just trying to type some text and move it took several trips into the menu system. You have to spend a lot of time customising the toolstrips. Something generic that is written with an actual clue about what users want to do would really benefit the users of these boards.

My only concerns about the common standard is that a) RM is leading it and I don't really think they can be trusted to be impartial. I can just see them trying to level the playing field away from Smart and Promethean and into their favour instead and b) at the end of the day I can't see Smart and Promethean agreeing to work on a joint standard just like last time. Especially since these are worldwide markets and Becta is just a UK agency.

I guess only time will tell as to what happens here.

Smart Exchange Launched

Sounds like Smart are revamping their community areas with the launch of Smart Exchange. I always found that this was something Promethean always did better with their Promethean World / Promethean Planet sites.. The official Smart community always felt a little nebulous and the edcompass forum felt rather empty the few times I popped in there.

To quote the press release:

"SMART Technologies announces the launch of SMART Exchange, a new online community that will help educators around the world share information, connect with colleagues and collaborate on various topics, regardless of distance or time zones. SMART Exchange goes beyond a text-based forum and gives members access to an events calendar, photo gallery and resource downloads. The community provides a central space for sharing teaching ideas and best practices, posting tips and connecting with SMART experts. It also offers a variety of tools, information and resources that teachers can use to create engaging and interactive learning environments."

You can access Smart Exchange here http://exchange.smarttech.com/

Full press release here.

Fast Video Downloader

Save embedded video files from video-hosting servers such as YouTube. This is very useful for those schools that block access to YouTube and prevent you showing some of the great video clips for use in education.

You can download the video downloader here:

Videos are saved in the .flv Flash Video format and can be dragged straight onto the page in Smart Notebook for viewing.

First post

I think it's obligatory to make the first post on any new blog a Hello World post with a die hard promise to update the blog regularly and make it the best blog on the Internet.

Past experience has shown that I can't really promise the last two of those, but I can manage a Hello World.

The aim, as most blogs need one these days, is to focus on the use of Interactive Whiteboards, and probably more specifically Smartboards and to share some of the hints, tips and news that I occasionally pick up in my role as a freelance Smart Masters trainer and science / ict consultant.

For other related things, check out my del.icio.us links on the right hand side, and my twitter stream. You can also try the Whiteboard Web forum.