Smartboard lesson planning

Smart boards are great for engaging students in a lesson. However, I found creating the Smart board lesson very frustrating - and I am a tech. person!

While I had no problem creating a really nice, informative, flowing Power Point lesson, I struggled with the Smart board software to create a similar lesson. Some of the things that should have been easy to implement simply weren't. In the end, I had a lesson that I was sort-of happy with... but definitely not crazy about.

My biggest struggle came from creating a slide that allowed the user to click on a balloon and find out if the answer was correct or not. I simply could not get that activity to work properly!! To compromise, I used "click on" circles to do a similar slide. HOWEVER, I again had a devil of a time getting the writing on the front of the circle to stay put and not overlap the writing hidden behind the circle. (The writing on the circle was white - which showed up against the blue circle, but disappeared once the circle went away and became a white screen. The hidden writing was black, but if the white writing overlapped it, parts of the black became spotted...) I also really wanted to change the color of the circles, but I couldn't get that to work. Cloning the circles didn't work well, either. I had to clone only the words, then re-order them, then put the "click on" circle over them manually, then check that it actually worked correctly... Really a pain in the neck when dealing with 5 circles!

While I did like the activities that I created for the students, I would have liked to incorporate regular Power Point slides into the Smart board presentation. It was definitely much harder to create nicely formatted informational Smart board slides than informational Power Point slides! I'm going to try to figure out how to do this, as the Smart board software creators had to be thinking along these lines... I just haven't had enough time to fully dig through all of the options!

As of this point, I like creating lessons in Power Point much better than in Smart board software. I hope to have more time in the future to find out all that Smart board has to offer... Although it will probably be a mute point as I will end up in a school with Promethean boards and completely different software!!!!!

This was not my favorite lesson so far......

You Tube Video Project

Making the public service announcement for YouTube was not only educational, but also a lot of fun! Crystal and I had a blast creating video tape that we could edit. We actually had too many scenes of us laughing, so it was good that we taped much, much more than we needed to.

The biggest frustration of the night was having to upload the video twice, due to my mistake of not saving to the proper place the first time around. However, once we got our video clips in the computer, it was fun to go through them and edit out the parts we needed. It was also really enjoyable to play around with the different transitions to see how the overall effect changed depending on how the video flowed.

We probably had the beat time when we were picking out sound effects and music. We definitely had a certain type of music in mind, and we were fortunate enough to find some that worked as we had hoped! The black screen / car crash effect turned out really awesome.

Although the entire project did take a considerable amount of time to complete, it was a great experience! I would definitely create more video for my class, as well as try to have my students also create video of their own. Video creation is a tool that is not only valuable in the educational setting, but also in the "real" world.

Link to video by clicking on Blog title.