smartboard user by algona81 Creative Commons licensed Attribution-Noncommercial
Yesterday afternoon I attended Ms Christine Ruder‘s Enhancing Your Smart Board Lessons presentation at MITC. It was outstanding. She demonstrated strategies such as: inserting scanned pages, page recording, magic pen, blending, using dual pages and pin the page.
Some of her tips included:
- Have students use their knuckles instead of fingertips when touching the board, less oil and dirt and the board sometimes responds better.
- Using the allow to move option on the object menu prohibits an object from opening to edit when a student is wanting to just drag it.
- Using the object menu to recognize writing and convert to text works better than the press and hold strategy.
- Make a point of using the locking option last, since you will have to unlock in order to do edit the object.
- Cloning is a real time saver. You can clone pages, just as you do objects. I wanted to play the Sodoku game she had created using the the infinite cloner feature to create a bank of objects to drag onto the board, and the new table feature in version 10.
Christine discussed many of the new features in Version 10. She recommends checking out the Lesson Activity Toolkit 1.0 in gallery. The spinner is now customizable. The audience ohhed and awwed with satisfaction when she used the new Shape Pen to draw a perfect square. They also liked the Magic pen which can be used to draw a square to magnify an area, or to draw a circle to spotlight an area. You can also save a notebook file with the screen in place, so that it hides what you don’t want immediately displayed when the file is first opened.
Her handout is wonderful with screenshots, examples, and hints. In the Blending section, look for the The Number Machine, one of my favorites, which asks you to guess the math rule. In addition, you will find some great sites in her other handout entitled, Notebook Lessons Websites. She highly recommends the new Spelling City and says Wichita’s Instructional Technology Department site is the “best resource of all” featuring notebook lessons to download. She also mentioned Fling the Teacher (more on that later).
Digitally Enhanced by Janetta Garton 