What Are We Doing???
Interesting to walk past one of my colleagues rooms early today, (one of the rooms where a new board has recently been installed in), to see that the day's schedule written in Word was on full display. Nice idea to show the children what they have in store for the rest of the day, (now if only I was that organised??).
Later in the day, I offered a couple of other classes the opportunity to come in to use the board to display a couple of the energy based movies that I had sourced from Teacher's Domain during my time release. I had anticipated that I could work quietly in the back of the room whilst my colleagues took over the board and the movie demo, (hmmmmm nice idea). Unfortunately I had not loaded the Quicktime player on the desktop from where they could work so in the end it was easier to play the movies via my laptop, which of course precluded me from doing my own work, ah well what's preparation anyway????? With the next group it was a geat opportunity to multi task having the movie playing in one window and then making notes in the SMART Notebook in another window. It worked well, though my teaching colleague was not there to watch and take it all in for future reference as she had to go off to attend to their grade pet lizard, which had broken a toe nail off, (painful for both of us).
Later in the day it was time for another trial this time using the display feature of the board and simultaneously, the SMART Ideas software. The idea was for a reading group of four students to read from Tiki the Penguins Energy Guide For Kids then do a group concept map on what they made of the site. As it turned out there were some teething problems, reading from the board proved problematic so I had to resort to photocopied copies of the page for the students to read. I also had to supervise the boys a little more closely than anticipated as they began the concept map. After a couple of firm words however they became a lot more focussed and the resultant map was quite impressive and showed some neat understandings of the content of the webpage. Clearly I had over-estimated there desire to complete a map compared to there desire to see how many features of the SMART Ideas software they could master. in the next reading group session I will be better prepared.
Later in the day, I offered a couple of other classes the opportunity to come in to use the board to display a couple of the energy based movies that I had sourced from Teacher's Domain during my time release. I had anticipated that I could work quietly in the back of the room whilst my colleagues took over the board and the movie demo, (hmmmmm nice idea). Unfortunately I had not loaded the Quicktime player on the desktop from where they could work so in the end it was easier to play the movies via my laptop, which of course precluded me from doing my own work, ah well what's preparation anyway????? With the next group it was a geat opportunity to multi task having the movie playing in one window and then making notes in the SMART Notebook in another window. It worked well, though my teaching colleague was not there to watch and take it all in for future reference as she had to go off to attend to their grade pet lizard, which had broken a toe nail off, (painful for both of us).
Later in the day it was time for another trial this time using the display feature of the board and simultaneously, the SMART Ideas software. The idea was for a reading group of four students to read from Tiki the Penguins Energy Guide For Kids then do a group concept map on what they made of the site. As it turned out there were some teething problems, reading from the board proved problematic so I had to resort to photocopied copies of the page for the students to read. I also had to supervise the boys a little more closely than anticipated as they began the concept map. After a couple of firm words however they became a lot more focussed and the resultant map was quite impressive and showed some neat understandings of the content of the webpage. Clearly I had over-estimated there desire to complete a map compared to there desire to see how many features of the SMART Ideas software they could master. in the next reading group session I will be better prepared.
posted by mrpbps | 8:07 PM
2 Comments:
John, I like your blog and now that we are getting into smartboards I'll be going back into the archives to learn from your experience. I have linked to your blog on http://theopenclassroom.blogspot.com/
cheers
Jo
It was great to meet you today, John. I got a lot out of your presentation at the conference. I suppose I am passionate about the use of blogs in education and that's why it was good to meet a fellow traveller. Thanks to you and Kel for your work.
Jo
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