Online IWB

Skrbl is an online IWB with simple writing and drawing features but very interesting collaboration possibilities.

You can type, draw or write freehand, and use straight lines and shapes in your drawings.

The most interesting thing about skrbl is the ability to share your work with other people. The paid version ($10 a month) includes video conferencing and all sorts of interesting things. But it would be easy to get started with the free version. How about using it to play a game with another class in the school (such as guess my number, 20 questions (If the teachers also used their mobile, this could be very effective!) Or you might want to collaborate with another class to brainstorm a solution to a problem e.g. “how can we reduce the amount of rubbish in the school?” The Year 2 class could use red ink, while Year 5 use blue to differentiate the ideas.

You could also use the board for collaborating with schools in other parts of the country, or the world! Using MSN or Skype in another window could help co-ordinate turn taking etc. A question like “Describe your town” with categories such as shops, parks, people, favourite things etc. could be very interesting for both classes.

http://www.skrbl.com

Using websites with an IWB: Part 2

Yesterday we looked at how you can manage your weblinks using Activstudio’s resource library. Today I’ll provide a brief tour of delicious, a social bookmarking tool.

Delicious lets you save your favourite websites in a similar way to Internet Explorer (IE) – but makes it much easier to retrieve them. Here are some of the advantages:

You have a free account, so you can get your favourites on any computer. You can save favourite sites while browsing at home, then access them from a different computer at school.

When you save your sites, you can save them under different categories, or tags. If you were like me, your IE favourites were one long straggling list. If you were really organised, you might save them into folders. But it was time-consuming to put them in more than one folder e.g. English AND maths.

Delicious works by letting you ‘tag’ items. You can use as many tags as you like. For example, if I found a great video about fractions, I would tag it maths, fractions, number and youtube.

Then anytime I click on these categories, the link will appear.

Here’s my favourite bit: You can share these links with anyone you like! If you are the teacher who tends to collect great sites, just send your delicious name to the other teachers. They can’t delete your bookmarks (delicious’ name for favourites) but they can view them and bring up sites using the categories or tags that you assigned.

Here’s a three minute video to get you started. It’s from Commoncraft who make great, easy to understand videos about using the internet.

more about “Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain En…“, posted with vodpod

When you go to the delicious website, make sure you install these buttons on your toolbar.

It makes it really easy to add and organise your favourite sites.

delicious.com