April 14- Interactive Activities

The whole point of having a Promethean board is to make classroom instruction interactive. It's not just about fancy flipcharts and a place to write things besides another tablet of chart paper. Instruction and learning are not going to be remarkably improved if students are not interacting with the board in some way. Sure, many times I use flipcharts that have information typed in and only a few places to write in new information, but at least the students have to come and input that information. For example, in math this week we practiced using a table for problem solving. The flipchart I created had the word problem and a table. We had to input the numbers and information into the table after underlining the important words in the problem. Not hard or too creative, but still students interacted with the information.(Plus, I could just flip through all the text instead of having it written out on the board. Cleaner, user friendly, and organized. Another plus of the technology. But I digress....) So in my quest to make use of as many interactive activities as possible I did some research this week. Luckily, even though I may be new to Promethean, many others are not. And they share their lessons and activities online.

A few I found the most useful for my classroom:

BBC (I'm always finding good games and activities here. Now with the board, it's even easier and the kids can come up and play instead of telling me what to put in on the computer)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/ks1bitesize/numeracy/

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives

http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/vlibrary.html


I like these fraction circles I found there.













Forsyth County Schools (Georgia)

http://www.forsythcountyschools.org/its/kadkins/activ/pb.htm

Topmarks Educational Search Engine

http://www.topmarks.co.uk/EducationalGames.aspx?cat=12


NGFL-CYMRU

http://www.ngfl-cymru.org.uk/eng/index-new.htm

This site has tons of interactive activities that you can use online or save to your computer and pull up anytime. And it's free!

Here is an example of what you may find:

(For this video, I actually made the lesson online a full screen, and opened ActivInspire to record the screen. If I used this in my classroom, I could then upload the video to my school website for students to review at home. Neat!)

You can check out all the things I bookmark at my delicious bookmarks site (Link on the right side of the screen.) Anything for Promethean is tagged under "Promethean" or "technology".

Now I've got to decide which things to use in my lesson plans next week. I really just want to spend a day with the kids playing with all of it!