Senteo 2 video tutorials

If you use the Smart Senteo voting kits then you may already know about the brand new version of the Senteo 2 software. If not, you can download it for free here.

When I installed it I had a few issues. I think this was because I tried to install it over the top of the old Senteo and Smart Notbook install. I found I had to completely uninstall Smart 10 and Senteo v1, and then install Senteo v2 and it all worked fine. That may not be the case when you install it, but be aware.

To accompany the new version of Senteo 2, Smart have updated their training guides with some new printable guides and also 2 minute video tutorials. Follow the links below;

Printable Senteo 2 Guides

2 Minute Video Tutorials

If you haven't been to the Training section of the Smart website before it's well worth a visit.

Don't forget you can also ask for help and support on Smartboards and Senteo kits in the Smart Exchange forum; http://exchange.smarttech.com/forums/

Happy voting!

Podcasting with a dictaphone

I've been getting ready to do a podcasting training day in a few weeks and have been looking into different ways to podcast.

A neat little gadget that I picked up this week is the Olympus Digital Voice Recorder. I bought the WS-311M model, but there's a few different ones out there. I bought mine from Amazon for about £50 but shop around and you might get a better deal.
Basically what you get is a pocket-sized voice recorder that you can take anywhere with you. It runs of a single AAA battery and the 512MB model can record about 8 hours of audio, more if you change the recording quality (up to 130 hours or so).

This would be a very convenient way of getting interviews into a podcast since the students could take this anywhere; they could record "Vox Pops" with people around the school, or even outside the school. The Olympus has an external microphone jack if you wanted to plug a better microphone into it.

The neat bit is getting the files off the device. Basically you slide the battery compartment off, and it reveals a USB stick. Simply plug the Olympus into a USB port (You might need to use the supplied USB extension cable if your port is hard to get to) and then you can just take the files off as you would with any other USB file stick.
To process the files, I had planned on using Audacity, as it seems to be the one that everyone recommends. It's free, which is always a bonus. But this is where I hit a slight issue. The Olympus records as WMA files, and due to licensing issues Audacity cannot open WMA files.

This problem is not a major one, however. A quick look on Google turned up a nice, free, file converter that will convert WMA files to MP3 files with a single right click. It's called Switch, and you can get it here: http://nch.com.au/switch/

It was a very simple job to convert the file (or files) from the Olympus into MP3 to play around with in Audacity.

I've recorded a sample podcast with the Olympus, which I have then uploaded to Podomatic.com. I guess I could host it directly on this blog, but I wanted to see how Podomatic worked.

The direct link to the podcast on Podomatic is here.

I'm also going to test out the Podomatic embedded player, to see how that works. In theory, this should appear here:

Hope that worked!

If you want to see my presentation about Podcasting, then I've uploaded it to Slideshare here.

Podcasting

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Setting up your Blog

From my blogging and podcasting session, here's a guide to setting up a WordPress blog.

Making a Wordpress Blog - Upload a Document to Scribd

ActivStudio 3 Toolbars

Here's a very quick helpsheet I have written for a training day that covers the main buttons from the ActivStudio 3 toolbar.

Activstudio 3 Toolbars - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: Activstudio 3 Toolbars

This is the first time I've used Scribd to distribute a document, but it looks quite useful. If you also need it, I've uploaded my Smart 10 toolbar sheet there too.

Smartboard Tutorial - Themes

Here's another video about a new feature of Smart Notebook 10 - Themes.

With themes, it is possible to set up page templates - with the font size and style that you want, along with any colour schemes, images and watermarks.

Themes could be useful for title pages, Lesson objectives and suchlike.


Whiteboard Tutorial - Themes from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

It is worthwhile also thinking about what pages you use a lot - and adding those pages to the My Content area of the gallery. I have done this with graph axes, experimental results grids, lesson objectives. To do this, from the page sorter, select a page and click on the little grey box with the arrow in it - and choose Add page to gallery. You can do a similar thing with Promethean software too.

Whiteboard Challenge 2

Here's my second whiteboard challenge. Both Smart and Promethean software lets you alter the transparency of images, and also to make parts of an image completely transparent, which is useful for getting rid of white space around an image.


Whiteboard Challenge- Transparency from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

Try some of these out, and use one of them with your class;

Use a slighly transparent image as a watermarked background for a piece of creative writing, then write over the top of it. Maybe a beach scene or an image of a landmark

Overlay one image on top of another - maybe a new and old photograph of a building or a place. Or a Google map overlaid on top of the satellite image. Then fade one out to reveal the other.

In art use a photograph of a landscape - or a portrait photograph - and trace over the top. Then fade out the image to make the tracing easier to see. You could also use the straight line tool and show all the lines of perspective in an image

There are other uses too, see if you can think of any more.

Again, the challenges won't be going live until August 11, but check out the Challenge site for more info.

Smartboard Video - Lesson Toolkit

Yesterday was my last day of training for the Summer. I'm off until September 1st. I'll still be doing stuff for the blog and suchlike through much of August.

The last thing I needed to do this term was to film a session with myself and a Smartboard for my Smart Notebook 10 accreditation. A local school let me set up my camcorder and a colleague and myself filmed the necessary footage for Smart.

While I was there, I filmed some extra stuff for this blog, and also for a whiteboard challenge Jess McCulloch is developing (more on that in the future I hope). I'll upload some of these videos over the next few days.

The first video is just a quick demonstration of the Lesson Activity Toolkit which is new to Smart Notebook 10.


IWB Tutorial - Lesson Activity Toolkit from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.

Smart 10 and Tables

Smart Notebook 10 now comes with a tool that a lot of Smartboard users have been wanting for a long time - the ability to make tables. It was always such a pain messing about with lines to draw a table, and it never lined up as easily. The new tables tool makes this so much easier!

The "Insert Table" icon is on the toolbar, next to the Select arrow. Click on it and choose the size of table you wish to add. It's no different to adding a table into Word.

What's nice about the tables is that you can drag images into cells - and the images will automatically resize to fit the cell.

You can merge cells by dragging to select them, then clicking the right mouse button and choosing "Merge Cells". You can also right click in a cell and choose Split - to split one cell into more.

Another interesting tool is the Cell Shade. Right click on a cell and choose "Add Cell Shade". This will add a mini version of the screen shade that just covers one cell. Click on the shade to remove it. This would be good for hiding answers or additional help. You can see the cell shade on a few cells in the image below:



I have produced a quick video about the Smart 10 tables tool. You can view the video here.

The Magic Pen

One of the small niggles I had with Smart 9 was that there was no spotlight tool on the toolbar in Smart Notebook. I know you could get it via the floating toolbar, but it annoyed me that I couldn't get it quickly in Notebook without having to use workarounds.

So I was really happy when I was first shown a beta of Smart Notebook 10 with the tool called the Magic Pen.

The Magic Pen is brilliant.

If you write with the Magic Pen it stays on the screen for a few seconds and then fades away. This is great for adding quick annotations that you don't want to last - underlining an area on the screen, circling a key point etc.

If you draw a circle on the screen with the Magic Pen then it automatically turns into a Spotlight tool! This is my favourite!

If you draw a rectangle on the screen it will turn into a magnifyer - making an area of the screen larger. Good for making text larger such as web addresses etc.

Here's a quick video that shows how to use the Magic Pen. I made this with the beta but couldn't show them due to the NDA, which is why it talks about being the second video... I can't find part 1!!

http://www.screencast.com/t/WBCypM5Pcn0

Smart Notebook 10 Toolbar

I've always found it useful when doing IWB training to give teachers a sheet with all the icons on the toolbar and what they do. Many teachers like to print this off and stick it on the wall next to their IWB.

Here is my new guide to the Smart Notebook 10 toolbar. If you want, you can download it as a pdf file here.



In the future I'll do a post that explains what each of these buttons actually does.

Video Screenshots

One of the really useful features of most IWB software is the ability to be able to take screenshots from videos and use them in your presentations. Both Smart Notebook and ActivStudio have a camera tool that allows quick screenshots to be made.

This can also be done using the Print Screen button on any computer and then pasting the resulting image into Word or Powerpoint.

One issue I often come across when demonstrating this to teachers is that instead of a picture from the video they get a black box instead. This mainly happens with avi or mpg files that open in Windows Media Player. Quicktime videos seem to work OK all the time.

There is a setting in Windows Media Player that you need to change to be able to take screen grabs. It's pretty straightforward, and once done should not need to be done again.

Firstly - open up a video file and right click on the icon in the bottom left corner of the window (It may look like a small thumbnail of the video):

From the menu that appears, choose Tools > Options

From the tabs at the top of the window, click on Performance and then the Advanced button.

From the window that appears, find the option for Use Video Mixing Renderer and click in the box next to Use Overlays to remove the tick.

Then click on OK a few times. When it asks you if you want to continue with the change click on Yes.

The video should now be able to be captured using either the Camera tool in the IWB software you are using, or with the Print Screen button (and then paste into whatever application you are using)

I have also created a Video Tutorial to show you how to do this. Apologies if the sound is a little quiet.



Hope this helps!

Effective Presentations

Here is my first attempt at using SlideShare to share a PowerPoint presentation I have used in the past.

The presentation covers some of the advice I give to teachers when using PowerPoint or Interactive Whiteboard software such as Smart Notebook or ActivStudio.

It's amazing how many teachers never check the IWB resources they make to see if they can actually be read from the back of their classroom. Often the text is too small, the background too busy and the colour combinations very bad.

This quick guide should help

| View | Upload your own

Rub and Reveal

Here's a quick idea for using an interactive whiteboard. It could be a lesson starter, or form part of a plenary or could just be used throughout the lesson as a quick check on what the students have learnt so far.

This is something that always goes down well when I demonstrate it in training sessions as it is so quick and easy to do, but can be used in a range of different ways.

Watch the video here.

How do you do this?

1. Use the text tool to type some text on the notebook page
2. Use the pen tool to draw over the top of the text to hide it (you may want to make the pen thick and match the colour to the background)
3. When you are ready to reveal the writing, click on the Eraser tool and rub out the pen to reveal the text hiding behind it.

Another way of hiding the text could be using shapes to hide the text which can then be moved away or deleted when you want to reveal the word.

How might you use this?

This could be used as the example in the video for hiding labels on a diagram, getting the students to label it, and then revealing the correct answer.

It could also be used to hide the answers to questions given to the students on the screen.

A photograph could be completely covered in black pen, and then the eraser used to gradually reveal parts of the photograph, asking the students at different stages what they can see and what they can infer from what they see.

This is also a quick way of producing missing words activities - type or copy/paste in a block of text and instead of having to go through and delete the missing words and add spaces, just cover each word you want to take out with white pen. It's also easier to reveal the correct answer too.

if you want the Smart Notebook file with the above example of labelling David Beckham in French, then click here to download it.

(Footnote: apologies to any readers from across the sea if I keep calling it the rubber tool on the video. I try to call it the eraser, but over here we call it the rubber. I do know that word has different connotations over where, but just put it down to English eccentricity and go with it!)