With three fantastic speakers on the night we were gifted with many tips and tricks for better IWB use. To sum up a few of the main points I have taken just a smidgen of the total tips given to us and listed them below.
Julie’s top tips
• Plan your day using the board
o Have a page uses pictures to show each main activity for the day
o After each activity is done, go to the daily planner and move the picture of the completed event (say lunch) and put it behind the picture of the bin.
• Giving the students ownership as soon as they come into class
o Let them sign their name up on the board (or move a pre-made text version) every morning to signify that they are in class.
o Make a checklist of items that they may need for an activity (like swimming) and get them to tick off whether they have it or not.
• Use motivators; once they’ve done the work they get a motivator (Julie’s example was the crab video).
• The use of mind-mapping tools within 2Touch Workbook that allow you to create brain storms in-class. Giving you the ability to expand each idea, whilst still seeing how it links back to the original subject
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If you enjoyed Julie’s ‘hands up’ crab video then you can check it out by clicking here: Crab Dance.
Lysandra’s catch cry was “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water”, or in other words, don’t get rid of the old lessons that you have from previous, non-iwb, years, instead use them to create new interactive lessons.
Here are some of Lysandra’s tips:
• Use scanners to scan your old worksheets and put them up on the board.
• Save your work so you can re-visit it and remind the students of what they did during the week.
• Get your students up to the board to complete parts of work sheets
o Mark the worksheet to signify the student that completed the task.
o Save the sheet, you now have your proof of the student completing the exercise, minus the massive paper trail.
Lysandra’s other big catch cry for using an interactive whiteboard was “S.O.S” translated into Save Our Sundays.
Corey Busfield
Using PowerPoint to create photo albums
Corey spent some discussing how you can make a photo album just of photos located in folders on your computer by simply using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Here is how you do it using PowerPoint 2003:
• In PowerPoint click on the Insert tab
• Highlight Picture
• Click on New Photo Album
• Click on File/Disc
• Now choose the photos you want to use
• Then click insert
• All the photos you choose will now be lined up under the heading pictures in album, where you can view them in the preview square.
• If you want to add a title to each photo, at the bottom of the box is the album layout section. Under the Picture layout section choose 1 picture with title.
• Once you have all the files you want click create.
• You can now go through and view all the pictures and let you kids come up to the board (using the on-screen keyboard) or simply use a wireless keyboard to allow them to put their own titles on top of the photos.
For PowerPoint 2007 only ther first few steps are different
• In PowerPoint click on the Insert tab
• Click Photo Album
• Click New Photo Album
• Now just follow the same steps for 2003 (from Click on File/Disc on)