A Window to the World

I am very spoiled by my Interactive whiteboard; it makes a fantastic tool for instruction.  But it can also make a great resource when you are not using it.

A few years ago I started collecting interesting and funny photos I come across on the web. Most of them are of cute animals, funny looking cars and pictures that I find inspiring or thought-provoking. This lets my students see all kinds of neat images during study hall or similar downtime when the screensaver kicks in. Then, this week I walked into a colleague’s room and saw her board filled with live a live video feed of an eagle’s nest. It occurred to me that the eagle’s nest was for the kids, a window to something new, as though the eagle was the classroom pet that they were checking in on.

This got me thinking of other live feeds I could put up during our downtime. Here are some of the more interesting ones I found:

NOAA undersea robot cam: live undersea feed from miles below the Gulf of Mexico

National Zoo cam: pandas, gorillas, lions and naked mole rats (You can also have an aquarium that never needs cleaning with the Amazon cam)

San Diego Zoo: elephants, apes, and more pandas

Monterey Bay Aquarium: penguins, otters and sharks

Eagle Cam: live eagle feed from Norfolk Botanical Garden, also another feed from Alcoa
My SmartBoard feed:

Smart board Slide Show

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Whiteboards Win Again

Interactive whiteboards have been great for my instruction. I can never say enough about the whiteboard acts a magic window in my classroom, allowing me to make my lessons engaging and relevant to students who are increasingly plugged-in. What I discovered this last week was that a whiteboard can also be very useful in staff meetings.

One of the other great aspects of the interactive whiteboard is that you never have to erase it. There are no bad or outdated ideas on my SmartBoard. I only have to create a new page to move on to a new topic, and only have to go back a few pages to see what was on the board last week.

This came in handy during a scheduling meeting that took place last week. Despite it being the middle of July, everyone showed up and even I managed to pry myself off my hammock. Scheduling in a small school is always difficult, balancing the needs of gym, music, and art teachers, and the lunchroom staff, and still trying to create solid blocks for math and reading is complicated. Often, with all the grades represented in the meeting, it gets difficult to see the big picture and take everyone’s schedule into account.

Enter the whiteboard. Within a few minutes, our mobile SmartBoard was retrieved from the library, the blank schedule was copied into Smart Notebook, and for the rest of the meeting I played Vanna White, creating color-coded “blocks” of classes that we then moved around like pieces of a puzzle, until at last, they fit and (hopefully) the schedule was made.