My IWB Challenge Week 4

At last... I thought I might crumble under the pressure!
Well, here I am at the end of my IWB challenge. I actually taught a full week of lessons this week - my first and only one of the half term! I was therefore able to "get stuck in" and use the board in ways I hadn't done before. Maybe I missed the training on "How to use the Activestudio to its full potential" but this week I taught myself anyway! It's so easy to use!

• I created 2 of my own listening exercises this week by just recording myself in Audacity and converting to mp3, then instead of just saving the sound files into "My documents" I saved them in the "my sounds" folder within the "My Activstudio3" folder and then when creating the flipchart I was able to just drag and drop them into the correct place. Fabberoony! The end result, a beautifully laid out table with a soundfile next to each person in the table and me knowing exactly what was going on (oh, and the pupils/ other staff in my Area being very impressed at my technical abilities!!)
• I also made an Animoto video of hobbies and tried to embed it into a flipchart but I think that needs more practice!!
• I also had a look at the "Flipchart builder" and founda lovely venn diagram, so I used that to do a "thinking skills" activity as a starter about breakfast food. One section was "France" the other was "Angleterre" and the class had to drag and drop the French words into the section they thought best fitted - naturally there were a lot in the middle bit!
• In addition, I used the drag and drop to create severla sentences in several different ways.

It didn't help that in all of my activities the software kept crashing so kids had to sit at the computer and move things around.

Onto Animoto, briefly, I'm currently working on a couple of projects with some classes...more to follow after half term!

Throughout this challenge I have learnt that:

1. The Activestudio 3 software is a lot more versatile than I gave it credit for
2. Lesson planning can be fun
3. Kids really enjoy the interactivity the IWB brings and are a lot more engaged thus they (should, theoretically) learn better!

I probably learnt a lot more too but have already forgotten it!