Allow student collaboration with your SMARTboard with the XC Add-On

The Extreme Collaboration beta add-on for SMART Notebook brings student collaboration from mobile devices to the SMART Board so students can text ideas to a single SMART Notebook page using an iPad, iPod or Laptop. In fact you can use any device with a web enabled browser.

Use this for brainstorming – collecting ideas from the class, random polling of opinions, language work, question/answer etc.

Basically, to get this to work, first go to the Smart Exchange and download this Notebook file. Within the file is an attachment that needs to be installed on your computer.

When done, you will see the Extreme Collaboration widget on the Add-ons tab in Smart Notebook (the one with the jigsaw piece).

Click on the Extreme Collaboration icon to start. You’ll be asked to activate the widget with your email address. Follow the instructions.

You can choose whether you want students to join anonymously or with a name.  When you are ready to canvas answers from a class click Start. You will be given a session number. In the web browser of their device students can either go to add2nb.com and enter this session number, or you can embed a QR code onto the page that students can zap with a QR reader to go directly to the correct page.

You have control over how many different messages/words/answers the students can submit – the default is 3. As they send words in, they will automatically appear on your notebook page.

The teacher can also see a classlist of students who are logged in. Clicking on a name will show what messages can from that student – good for simple assessment.

This is a really cool idea, and I saw this working at the BETT show last week. The message I was getting from SMART was that it is trying to promote collaborative work across devices, and this is one way to do that. This allows some of the functionality that you would find on a voting kit, but available on any device. It also works across the internet, so there’s no need to mess about with pairing devices etc across a network. You’ll need Smart Notebook 11 for this to work. It’s in beta, and the impression I get is that in the future there’ll be premium and free features. Watch this space.

I’ll do a more in-depth look at this in the future, but for now go take a look and download it.

You can get more information from here : http://www.extreme-collaboration.com/