Finger Friendly Art Sites
There’s nothing better than playing with an art program on an interactive whitboard and literally drawing with your finger. And there are some excellent, free, online drawing packages. Some are quite simple, and others really mimic real-world art materials.
Here are five online drawing applications that I really like;
Sketch
This is a new one that I only discovered today. The brush gives a really realistic effect and you can alter lots of different variables if you want – or just paint away!
As an aside – on this site you will also find a scarily realistic animated spider. It’s very impressive and rather scary if spiders are not your thing.
Crayola Digi-Colour
Choose from a variety of Crayola products including crayons, pencils and stamps. If you want to do something more off-line then there are colouring pages to print out as well. The Crayola site also has a lot of information for teachers including lesson plans here.
Bomomo
I wrote about this site a few weeks ago. It’s brilliant for making abstract drawings. Some of the pens are really fun.
Imagination Cubed
This has been around a while, but it’s still really fun. You can even collaborate with friends on a joint drawing.
NGAKids Brushter
This is a fantastic resource It includes more than forty brushes and customizable size, transparency, texture, and stroke options. A rainbow palette, along with a toolbox of special effects that blur, ripple, smudge, blend, and fragment your designs help make BRUSHster a full-feature painting program. There are many other applications on the site too.
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Finger Friendly Websites
Last week I was at a college running a session on how to use a Smartboard. One of the questions I was asked was if I knew of any good ‘finger-friendly’ websites that I could recommend. I demonstrated a few during the course, but this got me thinking about producing a decent list of these kind of websites.
What I wanted was to list sites that work well with a finger (but also with an IWB pen) and were very interactive. As I started going through my delicious links I realised I had quite a lot of sites that met this criteria. Current count is about 50 of them, far too many than for just one blog post.
If you want to see the whole list, I have gone through my delicious links and tagged anything that fits the bill with the tag “fingerfriendly” – you can see the whole list here; http://delicious.com/dannynic/fingerfriendly
I’ll try and produce some blog posts that summarise some of the best for different subjects. Watch this space.
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Whiteboard Room
The Plasma Screen & Whiteboard Room is a free website where teachers in special schools can download teaching resources, created by other teachers, that they can use on their plasma screens, interactive whiteboards, etc. All the resources have been created by teachers and are free to use for educational purposes.
The site provides a mix of PowerPoint and Smart Notebook files as well as web links and a few Word documents. There are some really nice big books and lesson starter activities. Most National Curriculum subjects are covered. Like most of my favourite sites it’s free!
The site is aimed at SEN teachers, but most primary teachers will find useful resources here that they could adapt or adopt. If you have some of your own resources to share, the site will also accept your resources to share with other teachers.
It’s a great resource, and I strongly suggest you check it out today at http://www.whiteboardroom.org.uk/
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Prezi
I’ve spent an hour or so this afternoon playing with a new website called Prezi. I first saw the site mentioned on Mark Warners blog, and I signed up for the beta. This morning I got my Beta invite.
Prezi provides a very different way of producing presentations and maybe can change the way we think about presentations.
Rather than working on separate slides, you add different elements to your page. At the moment you can add text and images and also drop videos and pdf files onto the page. You can surround these elements with a frame or leave them as they are.
It takes a while to get used to the user interface, and it’s well worth watching the introductory videos first. But once you get the hang of it, it’s quite intuitive to drop items, rotate them, scale them and move them around.
Once the items are on the page you can link them up into a path using the path tool. When you view an item full screen you can then move forwards and backwards along the path to the next item. Alternatively you can just zoom in and out and select different items in any order. Great for non-linear presentations where you just have slides which can be viewed in any order.
I’ve had a quick play with Prezi just to get my head around how to make it work. You can view my sample presentation here: http://prezi.com/9991/
If you like the look of Prezi, you might be able to get on the Beta test. Contact details are on the site and explain you are in education. Either that or wait until the site goes live, whenever that may be. You might also like to take a look at the Prezi blog which explains more about the site.
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Need a Hero?
The Hero Factory lets you produce your own superheroes. You can choose the gender and look of your character – what outfits they wear and then select their super powers. It’s great fun. Once created you can output your hero onto a mock-up comic book cover, or just screengrab from inside the creator. Remember you can use the desktop capture tool in Smart or Promethean software or just Print Screen, paste into Word and then crop down.
This would be great to inspire creative writing – students could make a character and then write about him/her. Or you might like to create Captain Maths who you use in your IWB slides to give the students maths problems or Doctor Atomic to provide a question to test in a science investigation.
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Creative Writing Ideas
Mark Warner of Teaching Ideas deserves a lot of kudos for starting off another brilliant collaborative presentation. This one aims to provide ideas for inspiring writing in the classroom. Like the others (listed below) it starts with a few ideas and then relies on the teaching community to pool their knowledge via Twitter or by sharing the presentation and adding their ideas. It was 21 ideas when I started writing this, it’s now 24 ideas and growing (Fridge Magnet Poetry is #22)
Take a look and hopefully get inspired. and if you have any ideas to share, contact Mark and let him know.
A reminder that there are many more collaborative presentations produced by Tom Barrett (and friends)
- IWB Classroom Tips
- Google Earth Classroom Tips
- Pocket Video Classroom Tips
- Google Docs Classroom Tips
They are packed with ideas, and if you have any more please add to them!
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Fridge Magnet Poetry
Here’s a fun activity from the Magnetic Poetry website – Fridge Magnet poetry. There are several sets of words to choose from. Drag the words and phrases onto the page to create your own poems. This is an activity you could make yourself in your IWB software with a lot of text boxes, but this site saves you having to think of all the words.
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Student Editions
Wouldn’t it be great if you could save all the notes you had written on your interactive whiteboard during a lesson and then give it to the students to revise from? Or to give to students who missed the lesson? How handy would that be?
But did you know you can already do that?
Both Smart and Promethean have produced student editions of their software. These are cut-down versions which allow students to view the files you produce in a lesson.
Promethean’s ActivSoftware Student edition can be downloaded here.
Smart Notebook Student Edition can be downloaded here.
Both versions are free to use, and your students are licensed to use the software as long as your school has purchased the corresponding IWBs
All you need to do is come up with a way of giving that file to the students. If you have a shared area on your network you could save your file to that. Name it accordingly (Teacher name, class and date would be good) and then students can take it home on a USB stick or email it themselves. Alternatively you could put the file up onto the school VLE if you have one.
Both Promethean and Smart software also lets you export files in PDF or PowerPoint format – if you just want students to have a static record of the lesson notes. Because you’re dealing in digital files it can be easily shared
This is a very handy way of making your lesson notes available to your students after the lesson. Try it now!
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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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