Faceborked
Although I started this blog with the main intention to discuss Interactive Whiteboards, I would also like to use it from time to time to discuss other aspects of ICT.
I would like to have a little rant, if I may, about Facebook. Now I joined Facebook a few months back, initially with the idea that it would be a kind of Friends-Reunited kind of thing, or a way of keeping in touch with friends and family. And in that respect it’s quite handy.
But there are several things that annoy me about it..
1. Viral Facebook applications. I have friends who sign up for just about every application there can be – from ninjas to jedis to pirates to what kind of celebrity/Simpson/household appliance are you?. And when they sign up to this, they send it to every single friend on their list. Now I then get a request to add the application, but there is no way I can see a sneak preview of the application unless I add it and give it access to my profile. They are bloody annoying.
Problem is, there’s a whole new etiquette in play. And I am to polite to send them an email saying “stop spamming me”
2. Facebook Hoaxes. There are several of these doing the rounds. For example;
OMG, hit FORWARD if you want to see who looks at your profile the most. All you have to do is Forward the message and hit Ctrl F4.
or
Attention all Facebook membeRs .
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
This is the Facebook equivalent of the old “Bill Gates will give a dollar for every person this email is sent to” hoax which thankfully I haven’t received for a while.
When I used to get hoax emails in the past I always referred the sender to Snopes.com which is a fantastic way of checking on all these hoaxes. I just despair that people think that forwarding an email will somehow reveal some new software feature.
Taking a look at some of my friends’ message walls reveals they are getting this same message several times a day. One forwarded it to 280 of their friends! These messages are in essence a benign virus being propogated by people. The “virus” doesn’t do any actual damage but like spam email the system is beginning to struggle under the sheer weight of all these useless messages flying around.
Basically – if you get one of these a) check that its a true and b) do not forward it on. Let it die.
3. Chain Mail Messages. Basically the same as above. These crappy messages that tell you to forward it on to 10 friends to get good luck or you will die/have bad luck etc etc. Chain Mails are an evil thing and I wish people would stop forwarding them on. They prey on people’s superstitions and fears.
Like the hoaxes, please let these die. Don’t forward them on
4. How many walls do you need? I had a wall, a super wall, a fun wall and could probably get a load more walls too if I wanted. I liked the idea of a simple wall I could leave messages for friends on. But then one got a super wall and left messages for me on that. Unless I joined Super Wall I couldnt read them. So I joined. Then someone joined Fun Wall and left messages for me on that. So I joined that. It’s getting out of hand. And the bulk of what is left on there is the same old stuff that used to just be sent in an email. It’s got to the stage where I have taken most of my walls down.
I guess a lot of this makes me sound like a boring old fart. But I just wanted to get some of my frustrations off my chest. And I haven’t even started on the privacy aspects – and the fact that I get told about every message friend A sends friend B, even if I have no idea who Friend B is…..
Social networking can be a very effective tool. But it’s a bit like the Wild West out there right now, and is in need of a little taming before it can be really useful.
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Whiteboard Tips Presentation
Just wanted to flag up a great initiative by Tom Barrett who has produced a presentation about whiteboards using Google Docs.
Google docs allows a number of users to collaborate on a single document over the internet, which has a great many implications for how we work and share information. You can produce text files, spreadsheets and PowerPoint-style presentations.
The idea behind the Tom’s presentation is simple – users are asked to give a tip for using their interactive whiteboard. You can read his thoughts about the presentation here.
Starting with 1 page, the resource has grown amazingly. Currently, there are 31 different tips for using your IWB. Most are general tips and a few are Smartboard specific.
You can see the presentation here. And if you want to add any tips, get in touch with Tom to get access rights and get to work!
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Equation Balancer
I’ve produced a new Smart Notebook file to help with balancing equations.
The atoms at the top have been infinitely cloned so you can drag down as many as you require to show how many atoms there are on both sides of the equation. The arrow and plus sign can also be cloned.
I’ll make versions for other boards soon. I did try making a Lynx version to test the software, but it kept crashing every 2 minutes so I gave up in frustration.
UPDATE MAY 09 – I’ve now added a Promethean ActivInspire version to the Think Bank site for download.
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ShooFly
One of the highlights of the BETT exhibition for me was ShooFly. This is a small independent company, their stand was tucked away upstairs at the exhibition, but I was really impressed with the quality of their resources.
They have already won several awards, and last week also received some interesting news coverage which has helped to raise the profile of the company.
A lot of companies are beginning to produce electronic resources to be used on Interactive Whiteboards. But a lot of these are either the equivalent of a powerpoint presentation or bigscreen games. Both of these have a place in the market but what ShooFly have produced is something that is much more than this.
At a basic level they produce big books or animated stories using Flash to provide the interactivity. These on their own are great and some of them, especially the secondary resource Angel Boy is amazingly atmospheric and visually brilliant.
But what you also get with ShooFly resources is a massive bank of additional material for the teacher to use. Smart Notebook and Promethean Flipchart files of the book pages as well as clipart galleries of all the images used which can be used in any application. They also come with a teachers guide and activity pack that puts the resource into a cross-curricular context with links to many other subjects.
They also have a website called Shoo Fly Pie which gives some free resources which you can download to use on your own whiteboards. Well worth a visit.
My particular favourite is the one that caused all the fuss in the press last week: The Three Little Cowboy Builders. I had never seen anyone attempt to make a 3D PopUp book on an IWB before, and it works brilliantly. The story is very funny too with the Three Little Pigs building their houses before the Big Bad Housing Inspector comes round…. great stuff.
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Heart Animation
As a former Biology teacher I am always interested in nice animations that can be used to demonstrate biological processes.
Thanks to Science Video Resources for posting this article about a nice heart animation. You can see the animation here.
Looking at the site that hosted this animation, I tracked back to the main teaching resources page. It’s worth taking a look at that too since there are links to some other interesting Biology animations and movies such as Mitosis and meiosis.
On a related note, Science Video Resources also posted another link to a resource that shows circulation in different vertebrates, that is also quite interesting.
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Tips for using your whiteboard
This list is based on the one originally produced by the Review Project a few years back. Sadly their website is no longer active so I will repost it here since it’s a handy list of things to consider.
1. Make sure there is plenty of space both in front and to either side of your whiteboard so that you can move around it and access all parts of the screen easily. It helps to be able to stand to the sides of the board to minimise shadow and to be able to face the class without being dazzled by the projector.
2. If you can, install wall mounted speakers. This means that sound is of better quality and carries better across the classroom.
3. Use a font type and size that can be easily seen at the back of your classroom – Arial, Comic Sans and Sassoon Primary are recommended fonts for schools. Check your presentations are legible: stand at the back of your classroom and see if you can comfortably read it.
4. Try to use background colours other than white – pale pastel colours improve legibility and if you have a problem with glare from windows without blinds, try using black/dark blue and using white or yellow for writing. Avoid distracting backgrounds.
5. When viewing a website, if you press F11 on your keyboard it will remove all the toolbars at the top of the page, displaying your webpage in a much larger screen, making the site more visible. To bring toolbars back, press F11 again.
6. Look into using a wireless keyboard which can be placed near your whiteboard for times when you want to add text. This saves dashing back to your computer each time you need to enter text. A wireless mouse may also be useful when you want pupils to interact with the materials on the board without the disruption of moving them around the room.
7. If you are going to use a website in a lesson, add it to your Favourites / Bookmark it and then you can access it quickly and easily without typing in complex web addresses. Or add it as a hyperlink to a page in your whiteboard presentation.
8. Try and create documents where you do not need to scroll up and down – instead of 3 paragraphs on one page, add 1 paragraph to 3 pages. Space your work well to leave room for annotations and comments, which can be retained if you do not need to scroll up and down the document.
9. Get the whiteboard software put onto your home/staffroom computer so that you can prepare pages in advance of the lesson without having to be at the whiteboard. Save the files onto USB stick to bring into school or email to your school account.
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Mercury Messenger
After travelling through space for 2 and a half years, the NASA Messenger probe has now arrived around the planet Mercury and is starting to send back images of the planets surface. The NASA Messenger website looks like the place to be to see these pictures as they are processed.
The site also contains many animations and movies of Mercury that would be great to use in a Science lesson on your Interactive Whiteboard.
For Students via kwout
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Rub and Reveal
Here’s a quick idea for using an interactive whiteboard. It could be a lesson starter, or form part of a plenary or could just be used throughout the lesson as a quick check on what the students have learnt so far.
This is something that always goes down well when I demonstrate it in training sessions as it is so quick and easy to do, but can be used in a range of different ways.
How do you do this?
1. Use the text tool to type some text on the notebook page
2. Use the pen tool to draw over the top of the text to hide it (you may want to make the pen thick and match the colour to the background)
3. When you are ready to reveal the writing, click on the Eraser tool and rub out the pen to reveal the text hiding behind it.
Another way of hiding the text could be using shapes to hide the text which can then be moved away or deleted when you want to reveal the word.
How might you use this?
This could be used as the example in the video for hiding labels on a diagram, getting the students to label it, and then revealing the correct answer.
It could also be used to hide the answers to questions given to the students on the screen.
A photograph could be completely covered in black pen, and then the eraser used to gradually reveal parts of the photograph, asking the students at different stages what they can see and what they can infer from what they see.
This is also a quick way of producing missing words activities – type or copy/paste in a block of text and instead of having to go through and delete the missing words and add spaces, just cover each word you want to take out with white pen. It’s also easier to reveal the correct answer too.
if you want the Smart Notebook file with the above example of labelling David Beckham in French, then click here to download it.
(Footnote: apologies to any readers from across the sea if I keep calling it the rubber tool on the video. I try to call it the eraser, but over here we call it the rubber. I do know that word has different connotations over where, but just put it down to English eccentricity and go with it!)
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The Plenary Circle
Here’s a simple idea for using an Interactive Whiteboard for an end-of-lesson plenary activity. It’s a very simple slide to produce;
1. Draw a circle and fill it in.
2. Lock the circle to the background.
3. Add text boxes with keywords from the lesson around the outside of the circle.
And thats it. At the end of the lesson, get different pupils to come to the board and pull in two words to complete the sentence “I have learned that….” For example “I have learned that body cells contain 46 chromosomes.”
Every pupil should have some thinking time first to think of several combinations they could use before calling pupils to the board.
This could be made more involved by “chaining” the words so that one word is left behind for the next pupil to use… but this means more thought has to be put into the words provided by the teacher in the first place.
If the room layout makes it difficult to get the pupils up to the board easily, then it may be worth investing in a wireless mouse that can be quickly passed around and allow them to move the words themselves.
I have produced a quick video about this activity. You can view it here.
The Smart Notebook and Promethean file that includes this activity can be found on this page. Scroll down to the Biology section and download the Mitosis and Meiosis lesson.
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About Me
Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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