Posts made in March 11th, 2008

Full Screen Please

Posted on Mar 11, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards | 1 comment

A quick plea to the makers of Flash-based games and widgets for use on Interactive Whiteboards. So many I have played with have been quite small and when displayed on the board they can be quite hard to see, especially from the back of the classroom. Most of them have no way of resizing the activity, which is a shame.

It would be quite nice to see a “full screen” button as standard on these activities. The BBC Science Clips do this, and it is a very nice feature to have.

I can understand why older resources may have been written with 800×600 monitor resolutions in mind – but since Flash is Vector-based, the whole point is that it should be able to stretch and rescale quite easily with no loss of quality. (which reminds me, I need to add a full-screen button to a lot of the Flash stuff I wrote as well……)

I posted the other week about the Yenka resources for Science. The one drawback for me was that the resources could not be resized. Well now they have rectified that, and they now open full-screen, which is fantastic. They’ve also added a whole load more resources so it’s definitely worth adding to your favourites list now!

So to makers of interactive resources – can we have a full-screen button please?

Blank Canvas

Posted on Mar 11, 2008 in Interactive Whiteboards | 0 comments

Back from holiday. Had a great time skiing. Photos are up on Flickr if you fancy a look.

I was clearing some of the photos from my mobile phone and I thought I’d share this photo from an IWB session I did a few weeks back.

Once I have gone through the basic tools of Smart Notebook with a group of teachers, I give them 10 mins or so to have a play with the software on a blank page to see what they can create.

Most of the time we get some excellent drawings. Other times, however…..