EWBs in Secondary Classrooms
By Paul McMahon on May 24, 2008 in Appropriate Hardware for Education and tagged IWB, secondary
I am soon to do some workshops for a secondary school on effective use of their Activboards. I have been
doing some trawling round for some resources and I have been amazed at the number and quality of resources out there. In terms of some great things to do with the Activstudio tools, I came across Tim Schmitz’s fabulous promethean in 30 seconds blog. This is a great resource, especially for the beginning teacher to get to know some of the quick, easy and sometimes, lesson-saving things that you can do on the board.
Tim’s simple and concise explanation of the magic magnifier, a technique I demonstrate a lot, is worth the read. This is a technique that is not EWB dependent so you can use it anywhere.
Another great blog which would appear to be written by secondary teachers is ActivBoarding. This looks like it is at least partly supported by Graham Wegner from South Australia. I think that the team approach to this blog is simply fantastic! It looks a great resource for any teacher, especially secondaries with an interest in using the boards effectively.
You can tell from the site that these are all keen teachers who are sharing their journey with the use of the boards for learning in the school. The recent post about the session with Dave Miller sounded very inspiring. I liked some of the ideas shared in the post and I think that the link to his maths resources is priceless.
2 Comment(s)
I hate to burst the bubble about the Activboarding blog but it has become one of my “too hard to maintain” projects. I haven’t updated it in over a year and yes, it was 99% maintained by me despite the original intent of it being a team blog. It is actually primary school based but I now just blog about any interactive whiteboard stuff over at my own blog instead of separating this focus from the rest of my teaching and learning reflections. Glad to see it is still of use. I was actually thinking about importing all of my posts over to TGZ and closing Activboarding down – what do you think? Should it just stay or maybe I could see if there are any other online educators interested in contributing?
Thanks for the reply Graeme. Sorry to hear that this project is not getting supported but your comment says quite a lot to me about our motivations for shared as opposed to personal blogs. It would be great to get other educators contributing but it runs the risk of then becoming a competitor to Promethean Planet.
My biggest pet peeve is the proprietorial nature of the EWBs. It would appear that there is some hope for a breakthrough with Promethean allowing its software to be licensed for use throughout NSW schools regardless of what board they owned. They are a long way from doing that here in Hong Kong unfortunately!
Can you imagine what a limiting factor it would be if we all had different incompatible word processors and presentation software? I have some great lessons done in Smart Notebook that have to be totally redone from the ground up if I want to use them on the Activboard. Any wonder that the majority of time I see a good lesson on a board it is running another app such as a browser and not using the propriety software at all.
The world needs a search able, indexed, open site such as a wiki where we can all promote the posting and sharing of great EWB lesson ideas in any/all formats. We could even have people with time on their hands going in and creating the smart notebook version of the Activstudio file and vice versa.
Sounds a bit like “I have a dream….” doesn’t it?
Wonder if MLK dreamed about an African American in the oval office?
Cheers
Paul