Interactive Whiteboards

Today, I'm going to talk about interactive whiteboards.

My school bought five Mimios a bit more than two years ago.

We decided that our 4 ICT lead teachers can have one each in their classroom and rotate one among other teachers.

As I am one of the ICT lead teachers, I was fortunate to have one in my class. It's been more than 2 years I've had it in my room and I'm using it nearly every day.. However, I don't think I am using it 'appropriately'. I use the screen all the time to do warm-up activities, show video clips and pictures. But, I am not using the mimio pen (which is also called as a stylus) enough.

I think one of the reasons for this is...

...

it's not instant!

Well... When I want to use the screen, all I have to do is to turn the TV on and connect it with my laptop. But when I want to use it interactively,, I need to turn the TV on, wait for at least 20 minutes for it to warm up, connect the mimio and then calibrate it.

I think I should be more prepared... and keep 'encouraging' myself to use it more often.

Oh! Look what I've found!

How to use your interactive whiteboard effectively

http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/page.aspx?o=ferl.aclearn.resource.id12137

What a funny weather...

It's raining outside... and it's been like that since this morning.

I often talk & discuss about the weather with my year1/2 children when we have an unusual(?) weather. I use my interactive whiteboard to show metservice website to the children. We talk about different weathers and their symbols. It is good for their oral language and vocabulary.

Go to Metservice website


Today, I'm going to introduce a web 2.0 tool that's related to weather.

http://www.cumul.us/

This website allows you and your children to predict the weather. In addition, you can also select the clothes you are going to wear (or the appropriate clothing for the weather). This website looks simple, but has numerous weather vocabs, so I think it is good for littlies (Year 1-4)...

Go to Cumul.us

Podcasting with Primary School Students

PODCASTING




I heard about 'podcasting'4 years ago, when I first attended Learning@School Conference in 2007. One of the breakouts (workshops) was about podcasting and the presenter was Allanah King who is now the deputy principal at Appleby School in sunny Nelson.

Visit her 'podomatic'-----------------> http://allanah.podomatic.com/


Although her presentation and the podcasts that she made with her students were amazing and 'wow'ed all the people there, I couldn't really see its uniqueness, usefulness or effectiveness (until now actually). I personally think video-clips are far better as it's the combination of 'visual' features and 'sounds'. When you can produce a video-clip so easily, (it is so simple these days to make a video clip with your digital camera and it is also easy to upload it on 'teacher-tube' or 'youtube' to use it on your wiki, blog or school website) why would you want to make 'podcasts'?

Hmmmmm...

There gotta be something about podcast that I don't know yet... I think I should read more about podcasting and try to make one with my children, before I say more...

Web 2.0 and Education

While I was finishing off my weekly planning for next week, I searched for some web 2.0 tools that I can use with my year 1/2 students for our ICT session & I found this image on Google. Obviously, there are heaps more web 2.0 tools other than the ones on this image, but it just shows us the interminable potentials in education.

I think I will spend some time exploring some of those web 2.0 tools. If I find some that I think are useful, I will post them here for you to try. :)