The White Board

On march 10th we did a whole ICT session about Digital Boards. The Digital Board is a kind of blackboard that works with electricity... so it's digital. It let us bring to the classroom a wider variety of activities and resources for theaching/learning.
The new possibilities that the Digital Board brings to the class are almost infinite, and you can use it for any subject or purpose; this tool is ready to bear anything!

As you can do with blackboards, you can write and draw in it as well as create interactive games, play music, surf the internet and save your notes from one class to the next one.
It really is a very powerful tool that is slowly coming into our classrooms. It is true that a lot of schools have this device, but it is also true that not all schools take a real advantage of this wonderful tool. Some teachers uses it as just a projector but others had found in this tool the perfect device to make lessons more motivating and easy to understand for pupils. 

In order to practice and try this new technology out, I have designed a very simple game to be done with a digital board. Taking into account the Blooms Taxonomy, this activity will fit into the Understanding step; this activity has been designed to check pupil's understanding and memory about a topic (The Space).

The target age for this activity/game is 7-8 years old and it would be played in Science Time (CLIL). Whit this activity you will be:

• Checking understanding about the Space topic
• Developing their thinking and relation skills
• Testing their memory capacity
• Practicing English and Science while having fun and using the Digital Board

This activity isn't something new. We all have done relation activity sheets (as students and as teachers) and we all know how they look like. However, redesigning this old (but great) activities into something more visual and new is something that needs to be done; as soon as possible and in the most innovative way possible. The Digital Board allows us to do this redesign process using all the tools that this device offers us. 

This classic activity, just "adding the ICT thing in it" turns to be a perfect TPR activity. It makes students stand up, come to the front and use their whole body to complete and relate all the aspects shown in screen. Once again, technology made of a simple activity something a little bit different and more motivating for everyone. 

But... how do you assess it? This activity was made with the purpose of having fun and review content, so you don't really need to assess it. But if you want to you will see it is really easy to do. If the students completes each screen with good rhythm and with not manny errors, that would mean that the pupil know. 

I struggled to upload or embed the activity in this entry... but you will find the file with the activity clicking here!

Ferran Rodríguez i Díaz

First contact with IWB

Last session was my first technical contact with the IWB. I had the chance to use it in some expositions in the university, but I only touched the screen to pass the slide, so I had no idea about all that you can do with IWB.

In the kindergarten that I’m actually working they don’t have this resource because of the age, we only have TV. But after the last session I can imagine different activities to do with the very little ones.

Before the last session I didn’t know how to use it and all the different kind of activities you are able to do. I think that SMART notebook gives you lots of facilities to allow you to create lots of different activities for different levels of teaching, and different ways of learning, thinking.. I was very shocked about how easy it can be to create a good, creative and complete activity.

I created different types of activities related to the animals, depending of Blooms Taxonomy. One of them is related to the Low Order Thinking Skills (LOTS), and the other is related with the Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS).

LOTS activities:

The first one it will be perfect for P3 students. They will have to find the pair of the other animal. So in these activities they will do two pairs of animals. It can be done by many ways and for different ages, for example doing pairs with the animals and their habitat.

Another activity can be the following one. They have to relate the picture of the animal with their characteristic, in this case the tiger is a wild animal, and the dog is a pet animal. This activity can be addressed for a 4^th grade students.

A more complicated but it’s also a “LOTS” activity consist on classify the different animal images depending if they live in the savannah or in the sea.

HOTS activity:

Now it’s the turn for my HOTS activity. It’s addressed for a 4^th grade students, because this activity involves more complicated different aspects. They have two different backgrounds: the savannah and the sea. And then in the savannah background it is a shell (an element from the sea) and in the sea there is a stone (an element that can be found in the savannah). They have to transform the shell and the stone to an animal that lives in each background, so they have to transform the shell into an animal that lives in the savannah and the stone into a sea animal. It involves a lot the creativity, but under the image and the drawing they will have to describe the animal that they imagine.

It’s a bit complicated activity but that’s why I have done an example, to guide the students how they have to do the activity and give them some ideas and inspiration.

I opened a folder in my dropbox with a pdf and the following document that contains all the activities. Feel free to download it doing click here.

Hope you like it, and better if I inspired you to do more activities!

IWB experience

I’ve never used an IWB before until last week in our ICT session. I don’t have an IWB at home and I haven’t started working as a teacher yet so I didn’t had the opportunity to work with this technology.

After the first contact with an IWB I can say that I really liked the experience because it was not difficult to use it and because I think that it is a very useful tool that offers some advantages when teaching and affects learning in several ways.

First of all, digital boards can promote and increase students’ motivation and enthusiasm for learning and, consequently, raise the level of students’ engagement in classroom and prevent passive learning. Sessions become dynamic and participative and children have an active role, so I imagine that they enjoy it.  

Secondly, IWBs provides visual support that complements teachers’ explanations and help children to understand better the content of the lesson.

IWBs also provide a wide variety of dynamic activities to be done in the classroom. As teachers, we can create many types of activities for our kids and children can draw; write, put images, copy and paste things as many times they want, be creative, add audio files and audio recordings do the exercises the teacher prepares and create their own ones.

Finally, apart from teaching specific content related to a subject or topic, we also educate children to become ICT knowledgeable students.

In the last session I was being working on two different Smart Board activities related to Bloom’s Taxonomy.

The first activity is based on remembering so it is for working on Lower Order Thinking Skills. It is an activity for first grade of primary. It consists on matching the words with the correct images so, after having previously introduced clothes vocabulary, children have to relate words and pictures to practice and remember the vocabulary presented.

The second one focusses on creation so promotes higher order thinking skills. This activity is for second or third grade of primary (depending on their level of English) and the topic is “wild animals”. We’ll do it after dealing with wild animals. It is called I spy with my little eye something… and under the title they have a square and a speaking bubble. Inside the square they have to “draw” a wild animal, the one they want (they have to look for an image of this animal and past it inside the square). Then, they have to write a short description of this animal inside the speaking bubble (see in the example) and finally, they also have read out loud and record the description and add it inside the bubble. Once they have created the activity, they will group in peers or in threes and they will play the game. So one child will start reading and listening the description of his classmate and he will try to guess which animal it is. When he thinks that he knows the animal, he will click inside the square and the image will appear so he will be able to check if he was right or not. If he doesn’t know the animal, he can ask his classmate for some more clues. Then, the other child will do the same. The image is an example of the final product. Children have to design all the activity (write the title, draw the square and the speaking bubble, search the image of the animal, past it inside the square and add animation, write the description inside the bubble and record the description.)

here is the link to get to the file

IWB - Interactive whiteboards

Currently most of the classes in the schools have Interactive whiteboards and it is actually a very good tool to use in the teaching-learning process.

The proper use of this tool helps to develop more dynamic and showy lessons and it helps to increase children’s participation. Moreover it can be used with students of all ages and in all the different subjects.

Regarding to my experience I used IWB several times in different schools but my experience was rather poor because I used it as a computer. Therefore I did not use it at all as an interactive tool.

I created two different activities to be used with IWB. The first one is developed with the Lesson Activity Toolkit 2.0 and it is a memory related to the Trafalgar Square from London.  

It is a LOTS (Lower Order Thinking Skills) activity and it is based on remembering and understanding.

The second one is more complex and it is a HOTS (Higher Order Thinking Skills) activity. It is a creating and analyzing activity and it consists in creating a new Trafalgar Square. There are different images of objects and parts of the real Trafalgar Square and children can make up a new Trafalgar Square putting the images in the white spaces.  

The different pictures are locked and children can move them but not modify them. The pictures have also a recording and every time a person touches the picture there is a sound of the name of the object touched.      

Both activities are created for P5 and it is important to make a previous knowledge and to work on the different vocabulary.  

IWB nowadays

Working with IWB

Nowadays, digital boards cover different aspects in Primary School. Digital boards integrate technology in the classroom, sessions become dynamic and cognitive development increases.

I have been using digital boards for several years almost every day and I can say that children really enjoy it. It is a very useful tool in the class because it provides visual support, music, a timer, Internet, examples… an endless number of resources integrated in one.  However, what I like the most about digital boards is that students have hands on experience so it is not only a tool for the teacher but for the students too.

I have been working on two different Smart Board activities related to Bloom’s taxonomy. One of the activities is based on remembering and understanding skills and the other one focusses on creation, analysis and self-evaluation.

Both of them are adapted to a Primary 1 class. The first one consists in choosing the correct option for the different images that keep appearing on the screen. Having previously introduced vocabulary, students will choose which one is the correct one. This activity includes visual support and self-assessment.

The second one consists in a short and guided presentation of students’ favourite pet. They have the chance to add a photo with their favourite pet and talk about them with a recording. There is a template for all of them and, depending on individual abilities, they will be able to insert  a photo by themselves and to record a short description based on their previous knowledge.