I started a new topic with both S3 Standard Grade classes this week.
I introduced the idea of representing an electronic system by a block diagram and used the interactive mobile phones on the Sony Ericsson site to provide examples. My link takes you to the simulator for the SE W995 (shown below) but you can change the phone model using the links on the left of the screen.
I stuck to keyed models, rather than smart phones, since it is easier to explain the use of a switches under a keypad than touch sensitive screens.
The Sony Ericsson phone simulators work well on a SMARTBoard, provided you have taken time to orient the board beforehand – I use the 12-point wide setting.
Pupils worked in groups of three to select a phone operation; making a call, sending a text message, listening to the radio or watching a video and identified the input, process and output devices. These were arranged on three Show Me boards and the function was demonstrated to the class using the SE phone simulator on the SMARTBoard.
We discussed the energy changes taking place in each example and it was good to see pupils making links to the Telecommunications topic we studied at the beginning of the course.
I downloaded SMART Notebook 10.7 for mac last night after Danny Nicholson blogged that it was available. First thing’s first: I am delighted to report that SMART have finally fixed my biggest issue with their software.
For some reason, despite telling every previous version of SMART software during the installation process that I do not want the application to run at login, it has always gone ahead and started up of it’s own accord. There is a long thread on this issue at the smarttech.com forum. This was really annoying and, despite several requests to SMART, I did not receive a response from them.
So thank you, SMART, for finally listening to mac users.
Once i got it running, a tutorial popped up to tell me about the new features. Although it was disappointing to see that most of these new goodies seem to be restricted to users with the newer 800 SMARTBoard series, I spotted a new feature for all systems – the calligraphic pen.
I couldn’t find it anywhere on the toolbar and wondered if it had to be added by customising the toolbar.
I couldn’t find it there either.
When I got in to school today, I plugged in my 600 series SMARTBoard and loaded up the new notebook software. This time, the calligraphic pen appeared in the top toolbar beside all the other pens. You need to be plugged in to the IWB before the calligraphic pen is available as an option.
As someone who has struggled to produce legible handwriting on the IWB in the past, I quite liked the way that this pen tidied up my writing. Compare my writing in the standard pen (green) with the calligraphic pen (blue) in this screenshot.
I think the blue writing has been cleaned up. The letters are spaced more evenly and they are now all at a similar height. I need to check what pupils think of it, but this could be a serious boost to a pupil’s confidence when writing on the board.
A colleague came to ask for some smartboard help last week. She wanted to do an activity with a class that involved sampling with a quadrat.
It’s hardly the time of year to take 20 kids outside to our muddy football pitch to throw wooden frames around, so she was looking for a way of simulating the process on her interactive whiteboard.
She had been trying to create a table and move it around a Notebook page but the empty cells of the table were preventing her from seeing what lay in each section of her quadrat grid. I suggested that she could create the grid using a series of horizontal and vertical lines, grouping them together as a single item. She called in later that day to say it had worked and several pupils had used her virtual quadrat during the lesson.
My colleague shared the notebook file with me and I have attached it in a zip file, just click on the download link below to save a copy. I wonder if this could be used to introduce the idea of sampling in a virtual environment like Endless Ocean or African Safari?
Sessions on the first day were booked up well in advance, with 1000 teachers and auxiliaries spending Tuesday at the festival. I had planned to go along on the second day as the programme had more ICT and secondary sessions of interest to me. However, that changed when I became a late addition to Wednesday’s schedule with a double slot to speak about the work I have been doing with blogging and iTunes in my classroom.
The numbers for my sessions were low on paper but two or three times as many people turned up each time. I spoke briefly about running a blog before explaining how SMART Notebook software can be used to produce a videos that can be downloaded as podcasts with iTunes. Then we looked at the ways in which everyday handheld devices such as mobile phones and iPods can be used for mobile learning. I was genuinely surprised by the level of interest shown and the number of questions I was asked during and after each session.
I was delighted when I managed to squeeze into Ollie Bray & Derek Robertson‘s games-based learning session at 12.30 in between my own slots. I’d met Derek before, he was one of the tutors from my PGCE course, but I had never met Ollie despite having exchanged tweets and interviewed him on Skype for a podcast.
The single disappointment for me was the way that the event finished so quickly in the afternoon. My last slot was over by 2.30 and by then many of the exhibitors were packing up. If the rumours are true and the event is run again next year, then I think I would try to spend more than just one day there to ensure I could take something from the event for my professional development.
As always, I was economic with slides but I have embedded them anyway. There’s also an audio recording of the morning session attached to this post.
I watched José Picardo’s excellent tutorial for interactive whiteboards a few weeks ago and finally got round to trying some of his tips today. I thought I would try something for my S1/S2 classes and so I created two magic box Smart Notebook files.
For S1, the box contains the different forms of energy. The screen perimeter has images representing the forms of energy and the objective is to match the words pulled out of the box to the images.
The S2 file is designed to test pupils’ knowledge of food chains.
I had a surprise on the last day of term. I knew it would be hard to have a double period of my vocational electronics class. Soldering can work wonders for focusing the mind and keeping everyone on task but prototyping circuits in reusable breadboards is a different matter. Add a few pupils who have already completed their practical unit and you have the ingredients for a difficult last day before the holidays.
One of the outcomes I had set at the start of the week was for everyone in the class to know how to use a resistor colour code chart to determine the value of a resistor without having to make a measurement. I had pinned a snappy poster on to the classroom wall close to where the resistors are kept and, over the course of the week, I noticed that pupils had become more independent – choosing to refer to the poster instead of asking me to tell them the value of the resistor they had picked from the tray.
At the start of the second period, two boys asked if they could do revision for the NAB they would be sitting after the holidays. Could they also make up some revision questions on a sheet of paper? I was surprised and delighted that they had come up with the idea, these things just don’t happen in this cohort. Their quiz comprised 10 general questions on electronic components and their uses, followed by another 10 questions where the a given colour combination had to be converted into a resistance.
It was easy to ask the first half of the quiz to the class but what about the colour band questions? Well, I loaded up The Gimp for mac (Windows version available here) and created a “blank resistor” template for the boys to modify on the IWB. They quickly drew in the colour bands by hand and saved each as a new page in the Notebook software. Their willingness to produce drawings was unexpected and I captured each one as a gif file to keep for use again. A cartoon I saw yesterday reminded me of Friday’s events and I pulled the images into Keynote and exported the presentation as a Quicktime movie.
Try the quiz yourself. Each resistor appears twice. The first slide shows the bands, the next displays the resistor and it’s value so don’t click through too quickly. You’ll need a colour code chart.
I’m not posting this because of the ICT being used. I’m trying to convey that, when you least expect it, even a bunch of boys treading water until they can apply for apprenticeships can surprise you. Perhaps they thought they were having a “skive” on the last day of term. Whatever their motivation, I saw them take control of their learning, make excellent use of ICT and assess their peer group. All this within two hours of the October fortnight.
I had a moment last week when I realised that I could model exactly how a problem-solving strategy would look to pupils as they stared down at the jotter in front of them. I was trying to show my new Higher Physics class how to find resultant displacements and forces by adding vectors. This is the first time I have taught the higher course and, while I would probably resort to trigonometry myself, I had to demonstrate the scale drawing method as it can prove useful when several vectors are involved.
I wanted to show pupils, step-by-step, how to measure angles and draw the lines representing the vectors to an appropriate scale. I tried begging an old blackboard protractor from the maths department but there didn’t seem to be any going spare. In desperation, I turned to the SMARTBoard software on my mac, even though the room I was using at the time had no IWB installed†. I found a brilliant protractor and ruler that I could easily move around the screen.
The best thing was that the protractor and ruler are such a good match to the physical equipment the pupils have to use when it is their turn to tackle the problem sheet. Actually that wasn’t the best thing. The total best thing was doing a scale diagram with these tools live in front of the class and coming within 0.4° of the angle they obtained using trigonometry
†This is probably a gross breach of the EULA. Sorry about that. Yes, really.
