Interactive White Board and Storybird

This week, we continued working on our Interactive White Board projects using ActivInspire for Promethean. I have honestly had a lot of fun creating my flipchart on counting coins, but I am still working on it because it is fairly time consuming. I wish that it had templates like a PowerPoint instead of having to create the header and text box separately each time. Even though it is time consuming, it is very cool! All of the functions that are available make it a potentially very interactive resource for the classroom. For example, my students would be able to come up to the board and complete activities rather than doing worksheets or having manipulatives in front of them. I will have my flipchart completed by Tuesday, so I will then post it to my website. Here is what the front page looks like!

We also learned about another Web 2.0 resource called Storybird. This is a website where you can choose artwork based on theme or artist and add words to each page to make a small book! I thought it was fascinating and loved looking at the artwork. This resource would be more for older children or teachers because it would be too complicated for most younger children. Each Storybird that you create must be approved before it can be embedded, so here is the link to mine for now! 

Our next project will be working with Inspiration 9, which they call visual mapping software. We will be creating essentially a flow chart for a particular subject area that corresponds with a textbook. Luckily, Inspiration offers a free 30-day trial, so we could use the program on our home computers. I haven't decided what lesson I want to do yet, but I think I might try science since I haven't done a science lesson so far.