Interactive Whiteboards | Box of Tricks

Learn some basic skills for your SmartBoard

Posted by José Picardo on August 24, 2008

I have been busy preparing some training material over my summer break to share with my colleagues at work, should it be needed. Below you will find a link that will allow you to download a Notebook tutorial on how to make three basic activities for your SmartBoard interactive whiteboard (you will need to have the Notebook software installed in your computer). Please feel free to download it and to share it about if you found it useful.

The tutorial will show you how to:

make a Magic Box
make a Quiz
make a Fill in the Gaps exercise

Although anyone could benefit from it, the techniques used in this tutorial are very simple and it is aimed at IWB beginners, perhaps those of you who are about to go on a course or those who might want to refresh what they learnt on a course they attended recently.

If you are interested in learning some more basic skills for your IWB, I recommend you also watch this short video: Top Five Tips for creating resources for the IWB

Click here to download the tutorial

If you are using a Mac then you might have problems downloading this file because Safari will mistake it for a .zip file. It works fine in FireFox though. In any case, just drop me a line and I’ll email it to you.

Top five tips for creating resources for the interactive whiteboard

Posted by José Picardo on August 11, 2008

Here are my top five tips for creating resources using the Interactive Whiteboard. I am not by any means an expert, but I have picked up a few tricks and tips along the way that allow me to create interesting resources for the IWB with only the most basic knowledge of how it works.

If you are interested on learning more about making the interactive whiteboard interesting and, most importantly, interactive, then you should probably go and take a look at these other websites:

That’ll keep you busy for a while anyway…

Wordle: using word clouds in a lesson

Posted by José Picardo on June 18, 2008

There has been a flurry of posts in the edublogosphere this week about Wordle, a very useful tool that allows you to create word clouds from text. It’s very simple to use: you just copy text in any language, paste it into Wordle and it will sift through it and create clouds with the most commonly occurring words in the text. You can then edit the shape, the colours and the font in the cloud and even remove words you don’t like by right-clicking on them.

I thought I’d use it with my sixth form (16-17 year olds) and then report on it. This was my lesson preparation:

The Teacher Invaders are coming…

Posted by José Picardo on June 7, 2008

I finally got my PC laptop working again briefly (before it gave up on life again), so I was able to have a play with Teacher Invaders, the new free game from Andrew Field, the teacher behind ContentGenerator.net. All you need to do to start creating your own games is to download a small programme and away you go. Click here to play the game to test your knowledge of basic Spanish words, it’s very easy, even for those of you who are, how can I put it? …hispanically challenged (nobody’s perfect), all you have to do is read the Spanish and type in the English.

As it was suggested in a previous post, these games are fantastic to be played individually by pupils on their own computers or to put the interaction into the Interactive Whiteboard, by getting the pupils off their chairs and play the game on the board, which imbues the lesson with a sense of competition and it instantly becomes a more memorable and enjoyable learning experience.

ContentGenerator.net specialises in game generators with classic games on offer, such as Fling the Teacher or Penalty Shoot-out. Not all of the games are free, but they are very reasonably priced and I shall be buying them myself for www.AsiSeHace.net, my Spanish revision website, as soon as I get Windows installed on my Mac.

Just before I go, I’d like to make a comment about the game, constructive criticism if you like: although it is fantastic that the game supports foreign and accented characters (like ñ or á), as a languages teacher, I always find that it is important to give clear instructions to the player on how to answer the questions in addition to the game’s title, for example: conjugate in the first person singular or use the definite article, so perhaps this facility is something that can be added to the games in the future.

33 interesting ways to use your interactive whiteboard

Posted by José Picardo on June 5, 2008

Tom Barrett has produced this wonderful Google Docs slideshow outlining, as the title suggests, 33 interesting ways to use your interactive whiteboard. It’s a fantastic resource that Tom intends to keep updated with new tips, so keep an eye on it and bookmark it, or even better: get in touch with Tom to contribute to it!

If you enjoyed these tips, you would probably like this video too: Top Five Tips for Creating Resources for the Interactive Whiteboard.

You can see also see come videos with interactive whiteboard tips that I recorded earlier this year if you click here.