Although this presentation was delivered mainly to Smartboard users, and the original presentation produced in Smart Notebook format, the information is very useful to any IWB users. Or even teachers who have a projector and no board.

So I have uploaded the presentation to Slideshare if you would like to take a look.

All of the links from the session can be found here : http://delicious.com/dannynic/t2t. The links in the presentation don’t work I’m afraid…. long story.

One thing that is worth mentioning is that if you now do a Google Image search you can click on Advanced Search to bring up more options. You can then specify what Usage Rights you want – so basically searching for Creative Commons images.

I also like the fact that in the basic Google Image Search you can now also specify the colour of the image you want. So you can narrow down your search for a Flower to yellow flowers, or red flowers. Don’t just search for Elephant – look for Pink Elephants!

Try it out, it’s very cool. Click on the coloured boxes to the left of your image search to change colour.

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1. Creative Commons Image Sources for your IWB
2. Whiteboard Tips Presentation
3. Digital Oscilloscope from Aartpack

And also they’ve simplified the Prezi editor so that it has half the menus of its predecessor, but having more features. They’ve made text editing easier  and introduced YouTube integration.

If you haven’t played with Prezi before – do check it out. It allows for presentations with much more impact than bullet-point-covered PowerPoints. And well done again to Mark Clarkson for getting them to agree to the educational license pack!

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1. Prezi
2. NeoK12 Educational Videos
3. Did You Know 4.0?

And if they can do it… you can do it!

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As well as making some interesting points about digital natives, it also shows how presentations can benefit from losing all the bullet points and combining small amounts of text with punchy images.

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1. Essential Digital Resources for your IWB
2. Collaborative Digital Storytelling with Storybird
3. Two new digital storytelling tools

I may not be totally here yet, but a lot of my newer presentations are trying to have fewer words and many more pictures.

Try and do the same with your IWB materials as well. A really good image can make such a difference.

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Some interesting information here. Thanks to Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod for this latest version.

I think the shift to pocket devices is the most interesting. I use my Nokia N95 a lot to check my email, but I only use it on a few websites. Mainly to check football scores, twitter and facebook. It’s very tricky to log into sites using predictive text, so I avoid it.

But having played with my wife’s new iPhone, really shows how it could be done. I thought the N95 was cutting edge when it came out, but thats nearly 2 years ago now. It’s much more of a portable personal communication device – with easier text input, better browsing etc.

More and more students will be bringing these powerful devices into the classroom. How do we harness that technology? Should we make them switch them off? Or make use of them?

How pointless is a filtered school network when the kids can access any website they want in the playground? (I once heard a teacher state that there was more bandwidth being used in the playground than in the rest of the school)

We should be teaching and promoting responsible use of these devices. Yes there are risks of them being stolen, of students filming/photographing teachers and each other in inappropriate ways. What are your school policies for dealing with this?

Here’s a great blog post by Mark Prensky: “Should a 4 year old have an iPhone?“. Makes you think. My 4 year old niece loves my wife’s iPhone. She took to some of the games really quickly. She loved animal snap These kids are going to grow up with these devices in their pocket, in a much more connected world that we ever had when we were growing up.

How do we make the best, appropriate use of this tech? And educate safe use? I’m not proposing any answers here, but it is something we need to be addressing. We’re supposed to be preparing students for the future, but we seem to be doing it by living in the past and pretending this techological shift isn’t happening.

For some more interesting facts, the 2.0 version of Did You Know can be seen here. and also check out the Did You Know Wiki.

(And yes, I have a month to wait and I can upgrade to an iPhone. I could do it now but 02 never seem to have any in stock!)

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You can add images by copying and pasting the image URLs froma site such as Flickr, or by uploading images. You can’t (at present) pull images in from a Flickr photoset in the same way as Animoto can.

It’s very easy to group images into smaller sets – and add captions to an image or a group of images very quickly.

Unlike Animoto you have to upload your own mp3 music files – you can’t choose from a bank of creative-commons tunes. But it is easy to get songs from a site such as Jamendo and add a credit to your video. This would also be a good way of producing a podcast – adding images to go alongside an mp3 podcast file you had produced.

The video generation is pretty quick too. You can produce iPhone video, Quicktime or Flash video. Once produced you can download your video as a file – or view it online. I can’t see immediately how to embed this video into your blog directly from Stupeflix. You would need to download it and upload elsewhere to somewhere like Vimeo. This is a little silly, and I hope they provide embedding options in the future.

So here’s the quick video on Stupeflix I’ve produced. Only took about 10 mins or so to make. Direct link to the video is here.

Visualisers – a quick demo slideshow from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

Jose Picardo has produced a good guide to using Stupeflix for podcasting – you can view it here.

There is a bank of ready-made videos on there, taken from images on Wikipedia from the look of things. You can view them here, and if you have an account you can use them as the basis of your own video by remixing them.

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It’s a neat way of getting a shared space to collect ideas from people for a brainstorm. Or to post resources for a topic. Students could ask questions about a topic which you (or each other) can then answer

Doug Belshaw set one up and posted the link on Twitter – very quickly ideas were coming in from lots of people. You can see the wall (now locked) here. You can also see a “whats so great about the smartboard” wall that Jim Hollis posted on his blog the other day.

As an experiment – I’ve set a Whiteboard Blog wall up here. Apparently you can embed the walls into your blog, so I will try that below (although it uses Iframes which sometimes really confuses WordPress)

Obviously with any open online space there is a risk of abuse. Wall Wisher only has two mode – one where only you can add stuff to the wall, and one where anyone can add stuff. Obviously it would be nice to have a more controlled protection where you can set people up to access the wall, or need a password to get onto it. You can lock the wall to protect it once you have enough ideas on it.

Wall Wisher is an interesting idea – and I am sure there are lots of ways it could be used in the classroom. I’d be interested to see how it develops, and whether there will be future modifications that allow more control over the space.

If you do use it with your class – leave a note in the comments to say what you’ve done. I’d love to hear from you!

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The study examined whether Promethean’s ActivClassroom had an impact at different grade levels and across different academic content areas in schools around the US.

The research found that integrating Promethean’s ActivClassroom into lessons can raise student achievement an average of 17 percent. The study determined that student achievement can increase if a teacher has 10 or more years of teaching experience, has been using the technology for two or more years, has high confidence in his or her ability to use the ActivClassroom suite, and uses it 75 to 80 percent of the time in the classroom.

If you want to read the full report – you can get hold a copy via the Prometheanworld site here. or you can read a summary at Eschoolnews.

Here’s Dr Marzano talking about some of his research

I’m still ploughing through the full research report – but it does make some interesting claims. It’s nice to be able to have some actual data to quote on the effectiveness of a coordinated teaching approach that uses IWB’s at the heart of it.

It’s important to note that just dropping in an IWB on a teacher and expecting them to teach with it is not going to get this kind of improvement (or any improvement) but if the board is also supported  by decent training for the teacher to make them confident and other support for the teacher then real benefits can be seen.

It’ll be interesting to see what other research projects are being done in this field.

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I have put the screengrabs, and a few photographs from the day into a short presentation. Hopefully it will help to illustrate some of the ways that you could use your Visualiser in conjunction with your interactive whiteboard. (Warning, if you’re squeamish – it does contain close up photos of an animal heart….)

If you do have a Visualiser then make sure that you have it installed so that is connected to your computer, rather than just connected to your projector. This means you can then use the desktop annotation tools of your interactive whiteboard to draw and write over the top of the images. You can also use the camera tools to snapshot images into your IWB software (e.g. Smart Notebook or ActivStudio)

Here are a few ideas for using your Visualiser

• Display good examples of students work.
• Show pages from books – save photocopying
• Model examination questions – write answers on the paper – work through as a class.
• Dissections – heart, kidney, plants, flowers, fruits etc.
• Display intricate models / objects
• Show parts of a circuit
• demonstrate how to use technical drawing tools – or maths tools such as rulers and protractors
• Use to make collages – assemble objects below the camera. Take snapshots as the image builds up.
• Video experiments – colour changes in chemistry – iodine clock/thiosulphate experiments. Remember visualisers on a flexible arm don’t only have to point downwards – they can be angled to look at things side-on too.
• Show how to use small gadgets such as calculators, pda’s (or even phones) – no need to use software and cables to mirror/simulate them on a computer.

and many more. If you have any to add, put them in the comments!

Also check out the Ideas to Inspire presentation about Visualisers for a few more ideas.

If you own a Lumens visualiser, then I’ve produced a short guide that tells you a little more about this particular brand of visualiser. You can view it here.

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3. Essential Digital Resources for your IWB