SMARTboard Workshop, Worcester, MA

I was invited to attend this New England workshop with area SMARTboard educators. This is a sharing opportunity for area educators and by blogging about what I am learning, I am able to bring you along on this workshop.

Check out this site first. http://education.smarttech.com/ste/en-us/

There are more than 450,000 whiteboards in classrooms. 15 million students using the technology.

There is a great contingent from New Brunswick, CA presenting their best practices. Allan, teaches at Blackville High School, Blackville, NB, Grade 10 and 12 English, history and media studies.

He demonstrated his Jeopardy Ancient Rome game prior to testing to help with recall. He used the powerpoint jeopardy template and then linked the blocks to the different pages. The linking capability was critical.There is also a timer included on each page.

Shaun, from Blackstone Valley Tech School in Upton, MA presented his website. He has included all his worksheets on his site which he is able to use also as an interactive worksheet on the SMART board, file print, one option is smartnotebook print capture, (the smart notebook has to be open). This option is available with anything you have on the screen, it captures it to the notebook and creates a great print option.(This is a by-pass of the scanning process.) It actually prints into the notebook in better fashion then a scanner, YOU can not manipulate the items in the document, it is a graphic object. The camera feature allows you to take a picture of a piece of the page and put it in your SMART notebook.

Shaun talked about how his class notes are available for students who need assistance, he makes this available for all students as part of his website.

Cheryl spoke of how Wells Junior High School has deployed 30 SMARTboards as part of a renovation project.

Derrick, from Fredericton, New Brunswick, CA , District Office 18, is a math mentor and works with teachers in his district. Using the notebook for his lesson, he demonstrated that the URL's are interactive, he inserted the graphs that students worked on in class.He showed how a lesson for making a cube demonstration, for visually impaired it is easy to zoom in and enlarge the page.

Eithne, from Blackstone Valley Tech School in Upton, MA, where her school has 1100 students a 13 town district, as part of their renovation they have 84 SMARTboards in their school and are working with a range of expertise with staff.She is demonstrating the new version of Notebook 9.5 and is relaunching her training. She used the notebook software to create the training materials. How to take their materials and print and add to their notebook. Eithne took her materials and integrated them into a SMART notebook file, with page numbers a customized training manual. She included the URL link to Atomic Learning so it is a comprehensive package for teachers to go back to. It has a whole section of 3 min. movie clips on how to use Notebook
9.5.

Elizabeth, from Burnt Church School. New Brunswick, they started with one portable SMARTboard and now all classes have one. Her students are using Notebook for their presentations. The students created their project about how to market something using digital photos and the notebook and how to use notebook as a presentation.

Gail, from Bathurst New Brunswick, she models lessons for teachers in math. She created her training lessons with Notebook. There are over 100 SMARTboards in her schools. So, she has organized her her lessons by grade level and topics.It takes about one hour to prepare a lesson.the WOW was the URL http://illuminations.nctm.org/Activities.aspx?grade=all&standard=all

Gail also shared a site where you can get free clipart. Animated objects http://dgl.microsoft.com

Once there search for a particular topic and you with then just copy the image, and then go to the notebook and paste onto the page.

Robert share a place for public domain source for images. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

All this happened during our first session for the morning.