If a teacher is lucky enough to have a SmartBoard at their disposal, it is their responsibility to use it beyond a “glorified projector screen”. It requires a shift in thinking from the teacher’s part to see a SmartBoard not “only” as a teaching tool, but as a learning tool.

I am taking a particular look at best practices of using a SmartBoard in the World Language classroom. My interest lies in how to best teach language teachers to go beyond a “drill and kill” vocabulary-translation type exercise and to use the SmartBoard in a way that allows students to experience the target language. In order to be able to use a SmartBoard with more than lower level thinking skills (remembering) involved, the teacher will have to have basic skills in order to manipulate and existing notebook file  or create new personalized ones.

While there are many notebook files being shared for commonly taught languages such as Spanish and French, there is a lack of examples for languages such as Hebrew, Chinese, Russian or Arabic. Partly because of difficulty with the non-latin alphabet, partly because the are just “less commonly taught” languages.

Learning to Tweak SmartBoard Files

What are the most important SmartBoard skills for these ‘less commonly taught” world language teachers to learn? What are the basic skills so they can tweak notebook files that don’t work perfectly for their students? What are the skills they need to ultimately create their own files ?

1. Take a look at the main toolbar.

Become familiar with

• moving between pages (slides)
• creating new pages (slides)
• opening and saving notebook files
• copying slides or objects
• undo/redo
• deleting
• screenshade
• full screen/split screen
• screenshot

• tables
• selection pointer
• pens
• eraser
• arrows
• shapes
• bucket fill
• text

2. Organizing Content in slides/pages and groups

3. Gallery-

• searching
• Interactive and multimedia
• Pictures
• Notebook files and pages
• Background and themes

4. Object manipulation

• drag and drop
• selecting
• rotating
• resizing
• cloning
• locking
• grouping
• order

5. Screen Capture Tool

Drag the cross hair across the area of the screen that you would like to capture.

• write in your target language in another program and insert into notebook to use as any other object
• capture an image of text in your target language and insert into notebook to manipulate further

6. Video Capture Tool

Click on red button to start recording.

• record in your target language
• share and review lessons or recorded stories with your students

7. Download  and open someone else’s notebook file

• SmartBoard Jewish Educational Database
• SmartBoard Exchange- Search for the name of your target language to see if any pre-made notebooks are available
• Make sure that your downloaded file has the “.notebook” extension. If it doesn’t try to rename the file by adding the extension manually in Finder or Explorer
• Tweak individual pages to customize learning for your student

8. Share your created notebook files with other teachers of your target languages

• Upload the file to your blog
• Send file as e-mail attachment to colleagues or listserve
• Offer to share files as you participate in conferences, workshops or webinars
• Submit the notebook file to a database -
  • SmartBoard Jewish Educational Database
  • SmartBoard Exchange-

What are some skills you would consider important for a World Language teacher to learn in order to create, tweak and use the SmartBoard software to bring their target language to life.

Here is what I started out with:

Topic: Addition & subtraction of fractions, mixed numbers, improper fractions.

You have:

• 4th & 5th graders
• A SmartBoard.
• 40 minutes

You need:

• reinforcement
• practice
• check for understanding
• engagement

How can I step away from the front of the room and “present” the topic, then explain step by step, then give them a worksheet to see if they can duplicate the “path” that I have shown them?

I want my students to be “empowered learners” as Alan November points out. I don’t want them to be passive recipient of knowledge that I am trying to fill them up with.

Adapted from Alan November (pp.188-193), Curriculum 21 (ASCD, 2010) by Heidi Hayes Jacobs.

I chose five different smartboard notebook files created  by various contributors from the Smart Exchange.

• Mixed Number: All Mixed up? by Anthony Santoro
• Mixed Numbers by abteach03
• Mixed Numbers and Improper Fractions by Smart
• Math Mixed Numbers Addition and Subtraction (Regrouping) by D. Stewart
• Fraction Story Problem Practice by Anthony Santoro

I let the class know that “this lesson” was going to be a little different . They were going to be looking at “lessons” other people had created. They were going to be exploring these lessons and evaluating them as to their effectiveness in regards to their own understanding, ease of use, techniques used, success in helping them learn the concept.

I put students into different groups and asked them to come up separately, as a group, to the SmartBoard to look at one of the notebooks. They were to explore a few slides and narrate their thoughts out loud. They were to explain their steps as they were figuring out what to do. Some of the techniques used in the notebook were more intuitive than others. Some of the slides were a digital version of a paper and pencil method, while others were animated and interactive. What techniques helped their learning style? Which slides were more engaging than others? Was it clear what each slide was expecting the learner to do?

Below are several screenshots of the notebook slides.

Will students know the content (mixed numbers, improper fractions, etc.) better after these 40 minutes? Are they learning to be participants in their own learning? Are they learning about different learning (their own) and teaching styles (tutorial/lesson designers)? Are they hearing explanations from their peers? Are they encouraged to make suggestions to make a lesson better? Are they actively involved? Are they preparing to become their own “tutorial designers” as they are dissecting other examples?

What do you think?

Keep in mind that this was a one time modeling lesson for this group. What would I do different next time? Create an evaluation rubric ahead of time for them? Maybe  even create a Google Form to submit their evaluation directly into a spreadsheet? How can I have their classroom teacher follow up this kind of lesson? How do we embed the new roles to empower learners  suggested by Alan November?

How would you make this a successful lesson to empower learning? Share your ideas how to tweak, expand or change it? What would you come up with? Be creative… Please share!

I had the pleasure of observing a wonderful first grade teacher today, Mrs. L. She is seamlessly integrating authentic data, math and her SmartBoard into daily lessons as well as making and connecting year long concepts.

Students at our school are encouraged to bring non perishable food items on Fridays for donation to the local food pantry. The teacher created  a simple page in SmartBoard notebook:

• Added the “grid-medium”  paper as the background
• Added numbers on the left side, starting with 1 at the bottom

• After counting the donated food items, choose the shape tool in your toolbar to draw a bar as tall the the number of the bars counted.

• choose the bucket tool
• select “solid fill”
• choose the desired color
• click inside the bar to fill it with previously selected color

Each rectangle is one square wide and exactly as many squares tall as the food items collected each week.

Each week students count out load the food items collected. They sort them into different categories, such as pasta, cereals, cans, etc. One student comes up to the SmartBoard and creates a rectangle, representing the number of overall items collected. The rectangle is than moved to be placed adjacent to the last week’s bar.

The teacher asks questions such as:

• Which week had the most/least items collected?
• How many items did this/last week have (three weeks ago?)?
• How many more did the”green” week have than the “blue” week?
• Let’s compare the “red” and the “blue” week. Which one has fewer/more items?
• What sentence can we say about the week in “yellow”?

The teacher also lets students come up to the board to use their fingers to count “how many more” one rectangle has than another. You can allow them to physically drag one week’s rectangle over another to see which color looks out on top (make sure that the longer rectangle is on the bottom layer (right click > order > send to back)

As she is introducing new math concepts throughout the week, the teacher adds new related questions to the weekly update session of the Food Donation graph.

Download the SmartBoard Notebook file

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Kindergarten students are graphing everyday. They are learning terms, such as block graphs, image graphs, more than, less than, most, and least. The classes are going “out in the field” (around school) to survey and record other students and teachers about their preferences.

Together with their teachers, they are graphing on paper, on the SmartBoard, even with M & Ms.

Students are identifying and working with columns and rows in order to create a class graph of different colored M & Ms. They are counting the amount of M & M of one color they received, adding them together and transferring that number to the class graph on the SmartBoard. Tapping on the cell shade reveals one M & M of that particular color underneath.

Logistics of creating the graph:

1. Insert a table with as many rows as you have students. Add as many columns as the maximum of M& Ms that students could receive
2. Add a photo of a student in first cell of each row
3. Insert the rest of the rows with an image of one color M & M
4. Add cell shades to each cell that contains an image of the M & M

Download the M&M Smartboard notebook.

The teachers also created  SB tables and just filled in the cells with a background color, creating a bar graph when each student records their preference. Each day they have different surveys that they graph.

Logistics of creating the graph:

1. Insert a table with as many rows and columns as needed
2. Fill a header (or bottom) row with clipart from the Gallery (or screenshots) that will represent possible answers for the survey
3. Fill the rest of the columns with a background color and cover with a cell share (right click or apple click) then select “add cell shade”

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2nd Graders have moved on from their Maps and Globes unit to learning about communities. Their investigation started out with looking at a map of our planet Earth at night.

We zoomed in to look at urban and rural areas and compared cities, like Jacksonville and Buenos Aires. the teacher then guided the students to come up with nouns that were found in rural and urban areas. These nouns were entered in a Wordle to create the Word Cloud below. The more one noun was mentioned by the students, the larger the word appears in the cloud.

The school subscribes to the Discovery Education Video Streaming service. We picked an age appropriate video clip about City, Suburb, and Rural Communities.

Each movie was divided into several segments. The objective of the lesson was to learn to extract information from a different media than a text book. In addition to learn about and work  with different media information, students also were working with different note taking methods.

Students were equipped with a paper, pencil and a clipboard, while watching the first segment, introducing the different communities and explaining general differences, . We started watching the video until a student yelled out “Atzor” (Stop in Hebrew), then summarized what they had heard and everybody wrote it on their notepaper. We had a notebook paper up on the big screen too to help with spelling. Students then called out “Lech” (Go in Hebrew) when everyone was done to continue to video. Notes were full sentences.

The second video clip was about life in the cities. Students, again, stopped the movie when they felt important information was being communicated. We then took a screenshot (with Skitch) and dragged it into a SmartBoard Notebook. The class made sure, by forwarding or rewinding the video,  to find just the right image / screenshot that was representative and was going to help them remember the information.

We watched and listened to the third video clip and extracted keywords to help us learn about suburbs.

The next step will be to continue watching the Rural segments of the video, taking notes and then compare and contrast all three communities in a Venn Diagram by moving the images or text in the appropriate areas according if they belong in one or more categories or not.

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I wanted to add my reflection to the lesson, as a follow up to my post” Map skills and the SmartBoard” with 2nd graders from a few days ago.

As one of the activities for their maps and globe unit, 2nd graders worked collaboratively by creating an imaginary island according to specific directions.

Directions were:

1. Draw a Compass Rose
2. Draw an island
3. Draw an Ocean around the island
4. There is a mountain range on the East side of the island
5. A river running from the mountains West towards the Ocean
6. Draw a small lake in the South of the island
7. There is a pirate ship anchored off the Northwest shores of the island
8. A pod of dolphins is swimming from the North towards the pirate ship
9. 5 palm trees are found in the North of the island
10. A princess is hiding to the East of the palm trees
11. A treasure is hidden in the Southern part of the mountain range
12. 6 pirates have split into two groups and are searching across the island for the treasure
13. The queen’s ship is approaching the island from the North to rescue her daughter

Here is the screenshot of the completed island.

After the map was created, I re-told the story, taking care to include as many times as possible the cardinal directions in relationship to the symbols. I paused in my story to make sure that students were following me on the map and asked them to supply the direction a character in the story was going next.

Ex. “…So, the princess was running (North) towards the beach, where her mother’s ship was approaching….”

Many skills were addressed in this activity, such as :

• following directions,
• cardinal directions
• symbols and visual representation,
• collaboration
• retelling of a story from a map

Although some children were getting antsy, while waiting for their turn to come up to draw or drag and drop the next step, everyone seemed to be engaged when I retold the story. The classroom teacher con further extend the story by asking students  to write the story about the pirate island and the princess’ rescue down on paper as homework.

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2nd Grade is off to a great start in the school year. They are exploring maps and globes. Why are maps useful? When do you use a globe instead of a map? What is a map key and how does it help us?
More and more students are becoming familiar with their families’ GPS systems too, whether in the car or on cell phones.

Let’s put these new learned skills to use by taking a screenshot of a map from the school’s surrounding area and creating our own map key? Homework had been to pay special attention to landmarks and sites as students were taken or dropped off at school.

Each student chose a landmark, decided on a symbol to represent and then adding it to the map key with an appropriate text label. Once in the map key “box”, a copy of the symbol was placed on the correct spot of the map.

2nd graders are using the SmartBoard to create and edit their own map key. Here is a screenshot of the map in progress.

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I have been planning with a second grade teacher to get her started in using the SmartBoard that just had been installed in her classroom.

She let me know that she was working on maps skills and wanted an activity to be able to reinforce and assess student understanding of cardinal directions.

I showed her how to add written directions of drawing an island on the SmartBoard and add certain features to the island, such as a mountain range, a river and a lake. Since we are talking about 2nd graders she suggested to add pirates, princesses, dolphins and a treasure too.

Here is the notebook file to download.

A few days ago, I ran into Screenr, a great little screencasting tool, that allows you to record an up to 5 minute screencast video, post a tweet with a link, plus the ability to embed the video later on in your blog (see below). In case you are reading this post from within a RSS reader, you might have to click yourself through to the blog in order to see the screencast clip.

Despues de un año, tuve otra oportunidad de hablar con docentes en el colegio alemán Goethe en Buenos Aires, Argentina. Esta vez fue una capacitación en Pizarras Interactivas (Smart Board)

El objetivo de la capacitación fue una introducción a las funciones y posibiliades del SmartBoard Notebook 10 software y despertar la conciencia a la diferencia entre el uso de la pizarra como herramienta de enseñanza (uso básico) y una herramienta de aprendizaje (uso avanzado).

Es importante darse cuenta, que el SmartBoard no va constituir ninguna diferencia en la enseñanza de parte del docente, ni en el aprendizaje del estudiante, si solamente se usa como una pantalla grande en vez de promoveer el pensamiento a niveles superiores.

Claro,  está el primer momento de tener una tecnología nueva y exitante en el aula, los estudiantes prestan atención y están motivados. PERO el verdadero poder de la pizarra está en crear momentos cuando se involucra a los estudiantes en crear nuevas maneras de manipular y descrubrir. ¿Cómo funiciona? ¿Cómo esta conectado?

Una cita de  Conor Bolton me viene a la mente

Enseñanza mala + tecnología = Enseñanza mala cara

No es la tecnología que hace la diferencia, es que hace el docente con ella!

Después de fijarnos en los iconos individuales del “toolbar”, mostré algunas técnicas de manipular la pizarra e incorporar contenido personalizado a diferentes materias e idiomas.

La última página en el notebook (lleno de globos de la galería) ayudó en no olvidar a compartir algunos consejos y trucos.

I have created several charts for my students with the table feature of SmartBoard Notebook. Although working with tables is not very intuitive, nor can they be as easily manipulated as in MS Office products, they have produced nice results with students. Students took ownership in their own learning and were actively involved in creating data in the following two examples.

Pssst SmartTech: Please make table manipulation easier in your next update!

To create the charts:

• I inserted a table by making sure I had one more row than students and as many columns as I needed for the number of skills I wanted to address in the chart (Adding an additional column AFTER the initial creation of table proved to be a big headache!)
• Use the text tool to insert each student’s name into first column.
• Find a images in the gallery or take a screenshot (with camera tool) from the web that represented the skill you want .
• Clone that image and drag and drop it into every cell under one column. The image will adjust its size automatically to fit the cell.
• To add cell shades to each column, simple right click each cell and choose “add cell shade”.
• As student master certain skill which is represented by the clipart, they come up to the SmartBoard and find the appropriate row (with their name) and column (with the skill they mastered or demonstrated) and click on the cell shade to remove it and reveal the appropriate clipart underneath.

Students LOVED to come up to the chart, AFTER they had demonstrated a skill in a completed project, I had made as the pre-requisite for “checking” a cell off. It seemed to help them stay on track, they knew what projects/skills they were working on and demonstrated a certain level of satisfaction as they were able to complete the chart in their assigned row.

Another chart I created was for first graders before Groundhog Day. Each student was able to enter their prediction whether the groundhog would see his shadow or not. As the story goes (Wikipedia):

Groundhog Day is an annual holiday celebrated on February 2 in the United States and Canada. According to folklore, if a groundhog emerging from its burrow on this day fails to see its shadow, it will leave the burrow, signifying that winter will soon end. If on the other hand, the groundhog sees its shadow, the groundhog will supposedly retreat into its burrow, and winter will continue for six more weeks.

The procedure of creating the chart, is the same as in example above. Except with two possible predictions (Sunny -will see his shadow or Cloudy- will not see his shadow) are represented by a sun or cloud clipart. Student come to the board to click on the cell in their row to reveal their prediction. After every students has made their prediction, the teacher could talk about how many students chose one option over the other, count each option, which one is more/less, etc. Teacher takes a screenshot of completed chart and goes over their predictions AFTER students watched the  YouTube clip of the actual event.

Other possible clipart (to be found in Gallery) to use in charts could be smilie/frown faces for yes/no or check marks or star stickers.