Oh For A Keyboard

Today we had a fit of the frustrations and found out about one of the limitations of the onboard keyboard. We were looking in particular at nets of solids and had "successfully" (?), used the Smart Notebook for drawing a number of freehand examples. I then decided to switch to Word and show the children how to use Autoshapes to create custom made nets. Of course moving the autoshapes around just using the arrow buttons is not all that accurate and I wanted to show the children how to use Ctrl with the arrow keys. Using this combination allows you to move shapes a pixel at a time, (a much more satisfactory way of positioning shapes). Alas, try as we might, the on board floating keyboard just doesn't have the functionality to enable the use of Ctrl and the arrow keys. Alas it was back to teaching from the laptop keyboard at the back of the room. Not nearly as satisfactory I noticed.

As we had a couple of free minutes at the end of the day we had a play with "Wishball", a learning object from the Learning Federation All Government schools in my home state of Victoria should have copies of these learning objects in their schools. Most if not all are eminently suited to use on an IWB.