Wiimote Whiteboard Adventures

Inspired by Doug Belshaw's post over here, I was finally inspired to try and build my own wii IWB system.

I'm not the most practical person (I'm still very proud of my D+ in woodwork at school) and I have never soldered anything in my life. But undaunted by this I trecked off my local Maplins electronic store and bought a few bits and pieces, as outlined by Doug.

Namely

An infra red LED
A microswitch
An AAA battery holder
some wire
Soldering iron and wire
A small plastic box

Stupidly I forgot to buy batteries so I had to liberate one from the pile of remote controls under the coffee table.

Putting the kit together wasn't too difficult. I had never soldered before, and an electronics wizard would probably freak at my technique, but the wires are held in place firmly so no problems there. I used a dremel to cut a few holes in a plastic box I was going to use as a holder and with a copious amount of sellotape, fixed everything in place.



The first big problem is that being as how the human eye is not able to pick up infra red, there was no way for me to know if the LED was working. I just had to assume it was.



I downloaded the Wiimote software, connected the wiimote via bluetooth to my laptop and.... well.. nothing happened. I was convinced there might be a bluetooth error (its been playing up in Vista) so I installed the BlueSoleil bluetooth driver... and promptly broke my bluetooth - the only blue I got was a blue screen of death....

I then spent the next few hours trying to get bluesoleil uninstalled and my old bluetooth working again! Once fixed I decided to leave Vista alone and try it on an old XP laptop instead.

This morning I wondered if the fault lay with the LED system. In my haste yesterday I completely forgot that the D in LED stood for Diode, which meant it had to be connected in a specific kind of way (hey look, I'm a biologist, OK?). Checking the connections I found that I had connected it correctly, but more through luck than judgement.

That left the switch. There are three terminals on the switch, and I had soldered the wires to the middle one and took a guess on which end to connect it to. So I cut the switch out of the circuit and just connected the wires together.

It was then I remembered reading somewhere that some digital cameras can detect infra red light. So I tried my N95 camera and pointed it at the LED. And success! You could see that the LED had come on. So the fault lay in the way I'd connected up the switch. I can rectify that later.

I then tried to detect the LED with the wiimote and again it worked more or less OK. The only issues are

1) getting the correct angle and range for the wiimote. I didn't get the exact LED I wanted and I dont know if this is as powerful. Range is pretty limited.
2) The plastic box shields a lot of the IR from the LED... Although I have the LED poking out through a hole in the end of the case it doesn't get picked up by the wiimote too well.

I need to redesign my LED pen a little. I may take a leaf out of Dougs book and get a large drywipe pen and embed the LED in that. I also have another LED on order from Maplin mail order that hopefully will work better.

So at the moment, no cool video of me using my wiimote on the wall. Hopefully I can rig something better up when I get a chance next week and my components arrive from Maplins.

Watch this space.

Update: Another good tutorial on building an IWB wiimote lightpen can be found here: http://www.teacheronlinetraining.com/wiimote/wiimotesteps.html

Embedding ICT @ Secondary Guides

Back in 2004, the DFES and BECTA produced an excellent series of guides which covered the use of Interactive Whiteboards in Secondary schools for each of the National Curriculum subjects.

Each document containsed a set of subject specific advice, guidance and examples to support more effective use of ICT in the teaching and learning of science. There is some great case studies in each one. I was pleased to have been able to have some input into the Science one - a colleague of mine wrote it and I provided some of the ideas.

A copy was, I think, sent to each school but when I do training sessions very few teachers have seen these. You can get them online, but they are rather buried in the quagmire that is the teachernet online publications catalogue. Some can still be accessed from the site, but others do not have an obvious download link or are out of print.

I've done some digging around, and here are the direct links to the pdf files for each subject:

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in English

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in Mathematics

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in Science

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in Music

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in Art and Design

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in History

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in Geography

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in Design and Technology

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in MFL

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in PE

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in ICT

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in Citizenship

Use of Interactive Whiteboards in RE

Thanks to Hertfordshire Grid for Learning, who are hosting all of these files on their webspace.

Other good guides from BECTA include:

Getting the Most from your Interactive Whiteboard - A guide for Secondary Schools
Getting the Most from your Interactive Whiteboard - A guide for Primary Schools

If you are interested in getting some ideas for the use of whiteboards in your subject, or you want some materials to give to other teachers in your school to inspire or inform them, then it is well worth your while downloading these guides.

The Plenary Circle

Here's a simple idea for using an Interactive Whiteboard for an end-of-lesson plenary activity. It's a very simple slide to produce;

1. Draw a circle and fill it in.
2. Lock the circle to the background.
3. Add text boxes with keywords from the lesson around the outside of the circle.

And thats it. At the end of the lesson, get different pupils to come to the board and pull in two words to complete the sentence "I have learned that...." For example "I have learned that body cells contain 46 chromosomes."

Every pupil should have some thinking time first to think of several combinations they could use before calling pupils to the board.

This could be made more involved by "chaining" the words so that one word is left behind for the next pupil to use... but this means more thought has to be put into the words provided by the teacher in the first place.

If the room layout makes it difficult to get the pupils up to the board easily, then it may be worth investing in a wireless mouse that can be quickly passed around and allow them to move the words themselves.

I have produced a quick video about this activity. You can view it here.

The Smart Notebook and Promethean file that includes this activity can be found on this page. Scroll down to the Biology section and download the Mitosis and Meiosis lesson.