Activboard Training

Today we had a third activboard training session. This was much more advanced than the previous ones.

Some things I learned that I thought looked pretty neat.

- Transparency. She showed us a lot of things to do with transparency. One was putting several transparent pictures on top of another. E.g. clouds on top of mountains. You take the transparent pictures off one at a time to slowly reveal the bottom picture. She also showed us how to make nice backgrounds useful by putting a transparent white rectangle on top.

- having kids record their ideas on the activboard.

- put several objects in a box for kids to drag out and sort (fly/can't fly). The boxes were neat to make and I can't really go into it here (well, I don't want to, it's a lot of little steps) but I now have made a box to drag things out of.

- colour reveal. We've seen this before, but she gave me a good idea about using a "Magic Number Wall" for teaching before and after numbers.

- Sentence scramble. Again, this is nothing new, but she had words you could unscramble and then a sound recording to let the children hear. They can reveal the answer by magic ink (or more easily by just moving a square/rectangle from it).

- Pull on tabs (making tabs for activities for different groups). The children can pull things onto the page so differen groups can do different activities with the same page.

- Extracting text (use the action browser). Could have some text and then have chd pull out the word "the" etc.

- Labels (if you give an object a label and set it to tool tip, the label only shows when you hover over the object). This could be used for a variety of things, (picture of cheese and hover over it to show "ch", picture of animal then the maori word for that animal appears, etc.). Could also be used to label a diagram. Each part has it's own picture on a bigger picture (she used the example of a volcano with smaller pictures (same as the big pictures, but on top).

- Screen recorder - for children to make a movie. Used a page set up with little red riding hood things (from the resource library). Set up an area in the middle of the screen and move the objects to tell the story. Could also be used to demonstrate a method in maths.

-Videos. While watching videos you can take snapshots WHILE the video is playing. This can be used to sequence the story or talk about vocabulary, etc. Example used was of circuit diagram. Took picture from video. Annotated on top of the picture, moved the picture to show a diagram.

- Containers. If you "contain anything" annotations written on pictures/objects stay where they are as you move. Good for putting notes on a post it note to move around. Could make a post it note template and set it to drag a copy so you can use it a lot.

- Containers (part 2): Containing  a specific object. I do this a lot. Good stuff. I did learn (well re-learn, Kedra showed me briefly earlier this week) how to bounce back. You have to put the bounce back "true" on the objects being moved NOT the container. Also, you can select ALL of the objects being moved and select move if not contained altogether.

- Containers (part 3): Keywords. Make the containers first, set it to keyword, set a word (best to do a single letter/number). Each object then needs the same keyword to match the container. Can select all together, don't need to do one at a time.

- Scroll Bars. Kedra showed me this a few days ago, but you can make a bar that goes only up or down to be behind a picture. It allows you to make words. Eg. a bar with s, m, h, r, b and the letters at beside it to make sat, mat, etc.

- Subjects folder->Mathematics->Counting: lots of grouped objects for up to 20 or so. I should use this for a flipchart for maths and my lower groups to help them learn numbers.

- Some random maths ideas: have tabs with each object but off to the side (eg 1 rabbit, 2 penguins), use them to make some easy multiplication problems, eg. 3 groups of 2 (so pull out two strips of rabbits).

- Profiles. You can set the toolbar for different preferences and move between profiles. Eg. for maths, literacy, etc.

- Grids. You can set a grid using the edit menu or the resource browser. Can be use to align objects. Can change the size of the grid by going to edit->grids. Can also be used to make pictograms. Could be used for a morning activity with the children.

This course was really fast and though there were lots and lots of good ideas, it was really hard to get my head around all of them (or even pay attention to them). I just wanted to play around with the things she was teaching us. Hopefully I will remember things and if not hopefully this will remind me. That's all for now folks.