Posts made in January 28th, 2008

Whiteboard Tips Presentation

Posted on Jan 28, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards, Presentations, Tutorials and Guides | 3 comments

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!

Equation Balancer

Posted on Jan 28, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards, Science Resources, SMARTboards | 2 comments

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.

You can download the file from the Think Bank website here. Look in the chemistry section.

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.

ShooFly

Posted on Jan 28, 2008 in Software | 0 comments

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.

Shoo Fly Pie | Free Downloads via kwout

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.