Class Smartboard Presentations

Digging in to learn this new software for this technology was time consuming but well worth it. I liked that all the class presentations were different; each person had their own style. I realize that it is a great tool, but only one of many tools. For instance, I liked the way Melanie used cards in her lesson. She used a different visual tool, which reinforced her Smartboard information and increased student learning potential. Her Smartboard presentation included a good video demonstration of the circulatory system that was interesting. Jaquella's presentation kept my attention the whole time. Her handout was great and my attention secure, because I was busy learning the information necessary to do the next problem. She really did a great job of layering her information, which provided us with the scaffolding necessary to complete the problems.

By participating as a student, I learned that it is much better to employ several different tools as well as different methods of teaching. I liked the lessons that were ease to read, and the message was clear. I think backgrounds should be used carefully so they don't overwhelm and distract from the lesson. I am going to rework my concept map and a few other pages where my font is too small. When I would be working on my lesson I would get so caught up in adding and changing things that I wouldn't realize how long I was working on it. I think it would be great to get a series of lesson "groups" made up for the Smartboard that you could pull up quickly to make a point. Each page of a group can be titled for quick reference.

I also learned not to fill each page with so much information. I want to use small bullets of information in the future. At the end, I had a handout of the concept map (which was in my presentation) for students to work on in a group. I think it would have been better to have handed out a work sheet in the beginning and use it to help reinforce the information as I taught. All in all, I learned a great deal regarding the Smartboard software and using it as a teaching tool.

Interactive Whiteboards

I am excited about the variety of educational applications that the Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) affords teachers. They can use it to show pod casts and engage students in web based interactive lessons. It can be used to create lessons that students physically participate in by dragging informational pieces or write in answers to solve problems. Teachers can make notations on presentations, or highlight information in their lessons to help further explain a concept and then save them. The IWB can also be used to simply write notes or draw diagrams to illustrate a lesson. When they write on a page if the IWB has hand writing recognition, it can convert it to print. Teachers can do many things with their pages they can label them, duplicate (clone) them, quickly and easily reorganize them, and incorporate preexisting pages in a new group.

What is exciting is that the IWB really expands the classroom giving the teacher essentially unlimited board space. Studies have been done to research just how teachers are using the IWB. It seems that the phrase "using the interactive whiteboard," meant different things to different teachers. The study defined five basic contexts for using the IWB. The first three involve the teacher either as a demonstrator, a modeler, or in control inviting the students to participate in a class exercise. The last two basic contexts are pupils in control being guided by the teacher, and pupils working independently on a task. At the close of the study teachers not only felt that they now had a way of uniformly assessing how they are using the IWB, but it also help some to expand their methods from just whole class - teacher centered work to independent pupil centered work.

There are published concerns about the US being behind in acquiring IWB for the classroom. Well if we are behind one good point is that the technology in our classrooms has to be newer and each year technology improves. Other people are arguing that the hardware is more important than software and vice versa. How can one be more important than the other? If one were bad it most likely would cause the user not to succeed in their endeavor.

 

Do not text and drive!

Video taping scenes for the PSA on texting while driving was fun. There were four people in the video, John, Kristy (his girlfriend), Jeremy (my son), and me. Fred, the dog, was also a very willing participant. We all collaborated on the scenes and dialog, but John was the main director. He actually hung off the side of a truck to tape some scenes! We searched for sad music on Youtube and I was surprised at how many we had to choose from.

Next he and I discussed all the different ways we could use the video in conjunction with different transitions and music. We could have the video play without sound except for sad background music and have scrolling printed statistics, or just our voices stating the statistics as the video plays with sad background music, etc. All these different scenarios brought us to our final video composition.

This was my first try at editing a video. I have made many family videos but never used software to edit out sections or add transitions and music. We taped ourselves stating statistics of driving while texting but decided not to use our own voices in favor of printing our statistics and using them as transitions in the video. We then inserted the statistic next to the best video clip. Since our video clips have an audio part of us talking, we added our sad music as a second (background) audio.

It was a lot of work but I really enjoyed the learning experience. Since the first clips we captured and edited were corrupted when we saved the video, we got to do it all over again. It is really amazing to me how minutely you can edit a video. This helped me get a lot of practice and since I have never done this before, and I needed it.

Videos in the classroom can be invaluable. Apart from just showing a science video, such as Bill Nye the Science Guy, videos can be interactive. As a science teacher I could show interactive videos depicting, active volcanoes, seismic studies of earthquakes, life science studies, etc., all with sections for student participation. These engaging videos help to bring science alive for the middle school age group that I will be teaching.