Ton Koenraad

The IWB Challenge has been set up to encourage teachers to try new ways to use their Interactive Whiteboards. Participants have to complete as many challenges as they can in a given time frame as well as post their own challenge for other teachers to complete. Read this page of the wiki for a description of exactly how it works.

Comox Valley Core French –
A collection of YouTube videos or links to YouTube videos on the (French) vocabulary related to a number of themes, such as: les couleurs, les jours de la semaine, les nombres, les mois, quel temps fait-il? etc...

Chansons françaises et francophones en cours de FLE / French through Songs and Singing –
This multimedia site features streaming MP3s, annotated lyrics, articles and links.

dotSUB – 
(Music) videos with the lyrics translated in various languages in subtitles.

Shahi is a visual dictionary that combines Wiktionary content with Flickr, Google, and Yahoo images. Type in a word and get images related to it, a definition and some example sentences to show use in context.

Spezify is a search tool presenting results from a large number of websites in different visual ways… We mix all media types and make no difference between blogs, videos, microblogs, and images. Everything communicates and helps building the bigger picture.”

100 Inspiring Ways to Use Social Media In the Classroom | Online Universities – This article presents ways educators are presently using social media in their classrooms.

In case you missed posts on IWB-use by Nik Peachy (we pass on his blogposts at his Quick Shout pages here at the CALL-in-Practice site) have a look at this selection.

Starting with Image Based Speaking activities that can be used either on an IWB or computer screen to get students talking and stimulate their descriptive vocabulary.

And suggestions for Combining Online Interactive Whiteboards with Voice applications and this one on Scriblink which includes VOIP, text chat and provides users with link to their online board. Or on Dabbleboard, a fantastic whiteboard application which runs in your browser. It has all the usual whiteboard features plus some nice extras.

Nik mentions several advantages of IWB use and in this respect points to very practical positive aspects: [...]'They save the need to: Carry flashcards, blu tack, envelopes full of cut up paper, videos, photocopies, coursebooks, DVD and CD players, multiple coloured board pens, replacements for the board pens incase they dry up, a TV, a Tape recorder etc.'

And to conclude for now a post on using PicLens on IWBs

From: SMART ACTION RESEARCH

Analyzing the Effectiveness of Curriculum-Based Digital Content Used in a Grade 6 French Immersion Classroom

This research, conducted from April to June 2009, concluded that SMART products improve student learning in French immersion math, French immersion science and English language arts. Through a series of surveys, video diaries, interviews, photos and a student feedback blog, Barrieau and her colleagues at Harkins Middle School in New Brunswick, Canada, demonstrated that SMART products, including SMART Response interactive response systems and SMART Board interactive whiteboards, foster improved student learning, enhanced literacy skills and active collaboration in the classroom.

Download the full paper here:

smarttech.com/researchHarkins

Graham Stanley, teacher of English for the British Council in Barcelona, was interviewed by TEFL.net. on his views on the use of Interactive Whiteboards in the languageClassroom. Graham discusses interactive whiteboards, including the importance of training for teachers and how to keep the I in IWB.

We fully support the balanced stance he takes on the added value of this potentially interesting classroom tool, pointing out the relevance of subject specific training and pedagogy. At Hogeschool Utrecht we are currently working on modules in initial and inservice teacher training. See e.g. this post at the Smartboard Revolution NING.

The British Council also being a prospect partner he also refers to the EU research project proposal on IWBs in Language Education we all hope will get accepted. More details here. I am really looking forward to be working on this together with him and other experts. As I could not really wait I already started some of the envisaged activities, such as this IWB blogging circle.

Any teachers interested in joining us get in touch with me through the contact option on this site. You can contribute in any language!

One of the pre-conference workshops at the annual EUROCALL Conference in Bordeaux (8-11 September) will be an introductory session on designing language classroom activities supported by Interactive Whiteboards.

For the sort of topics covered see my publication on the potential of IWBs in Language Education. Another option is the Utrecht SummerSchool Course (10-16 July) where we are proud to have the IWB expert Euline Cutrim Schmidt on our international team. More info here.

Next to edutainement Kerpoof claims to offer some educational applications. 

Potentially useful for the language classroom (spelling & vocab) are the activities here: http://www.kerpoof.com/#/activity/abc

More info and ideas & lessonplans on this page.

Also check out e-Learning for Kids to see examples of courses designed for use on Interactive Whiteboards.
Next to Math, Science, Computer Skills and Language Arts this non-profit e-learning site has also courses on English (L1) for young learners.

Finally there is this well documented case study on explaining syntax in primary ed.

Texas College of Education Technology has been providing IWBtraining for its students for some time. Regional schools are keen on getting graduates that are competent users. Besides it appears that the Texas Tech Grads are also more marketable in other sectors.
More info here.

Two suggestions for teaching English Idioms using an IWB in this post. First there is this tip on a Notebook lesson taken from The SMART Insider - Volume 8.

This Notebook lesson is a great starter activity for teachers introducing idioms in the classroom. It has three sections. The first section uses a common idiom in a sentence and the students have to choose the correct meaning. The second section gives an informational statement and then challenges students to pick the correct idiom. The last page challenges students to write their own idiom using information about Daylight Savings Time.

I also quite like the Animated Idioms pages of the British Council website which has entertaining animations to support explaining the meaning of a great number of idioms.

In workshops I always use the 'Bull in the china shop' expample as it also underlines cultural differences in idioms.

With applications by practitioners from  a great variety of EU countries (n = 8) and beyond (n=2) this edition of the Utrecht SummerSchool again promises to be an interesting event for getting ideas on and sharing knowledge about innovative language teaching.   

Still some places available but...the registration deadline (May 31)  for this Comenius course is approaching fast now.

More information and registration at: 
http://www.utrechtsummerschool.nl/index.php?type=courses&code=S5

'Designing activities for the 2.0 Language Classroom' is offered by the Faculties of Education of Heidelberg and Utrecht University of Applied Sciences in conjunction with the Utrecht University Summer School.
The course is one of the results of the EU-project 'MICaLL'. (also see Dooly, M. (ed.) (2008) Telecollaborative language learning. Moderating intercultural collaboration and language learning. A guidebook to moderating intercultural collaboration online. Bern: Peter Lang.)

This 7-day, international course explores WEB 2.0 applications such as Wiki and Web-logging, real-time communication (Videoconferencing and 3D Virtual Worlds) and the LanguageQuest format for integrating the World Wide Web into classroom teaching.

Besides, the course location in the brand-new building of the Faculty of Education in Utrecht, the Netherlands, allows for demonstration of good practices of and personal training in the use of Interactive Whiteboards. We are proud to have Euline Cutrim Schmid  share her IWB-expertise for a full day .

And, BTW, Euline is also partner in our EU-project application. 

N.B. Participants who would like to extend their visit to the Netherlands can apply for an additional period of campus accommodation at 135 Euro per week.

TSL Education offers free-to-use i-board software and a content collection for a number of domains such as numeracy and literacy, science, geography and history <no MFL so far :-(>. However among the contents for literacy there are some examples that could inspire teachers of young L1 learners or be used with ESL primary pupils.

For instance: 'A day at the beach' which supports activities where learners are asked to position the characters and construct sentences about their position or movement. Using the whole scene, you could challenge pupils to make a wider range of statements than those given... "the boy is standing next to the rock pool", "the teddy is sitting on top of the lobster (ouch!)"

Reactions to Tom Witby's recent blogpost on his own IWB-related professional development experiences on IWB-use show that the discussion on added value of IWB continues.
Tom, an experienced secondary English teacher, is adjunct Professor of Education at St Joseph’s College in New York preparing student teachers in the domain of educational technology.

Reading through the various comments, among which Paula White's, I found confirmation for conclusions reached in Koenraad (2008) on the relevance of pedagogically driven teacher training.  And it is also in line with observations I reported about feelings on IWB-use in the community of modern language teachers:

An obvious trap -especially for language teachers - is the temptation to use the digiboard as a kind of ' OHP with anabolic steroids' mainly for knowledge transfer purposes. After all, learning a language remains mainly a matter of actually using it receptively and productively. It is for this reason that opinions about the alleged added value of the digiboard for language education vary in the (international) community of teachers of modern languages. Silent witnesses to the discussion are a number of (parts of) titles of publications and blog items such as:
'Interactive Whiteboards: Boon or Bandwagon? "Interactive, Quite Bored' or 'White Elephant or teacher's pet?" and "Interactive Whiteboards: real beauty or just lipstick?".

IMO, it also confirms -again- another conclusion in my article about IWBs in Language Education on the importance of a discipline-specific training approach. For more content on this issue in MFL-circles see the discussions at the IATEFL 2009 conference and the recent 2010 event referred to in this blogpost.

More discussion <in Dutch!> on the effectiveness of IWB in education, triggered by a YouTube film on the subject here .

EFLnet hosts a collection of Language Arts review activities on topics like grammar and vocabulary and for listening.

These interactive review activities provide opportunities for engaging, quick starter and assessment activities

Most of the activities - available at various levels - are multiple-choice review questions that provide instant audio and visual feedback. Some require keyboard input.

Firefox users can use the Flash Game Maximizer Add-on to remove the ads and make the activities full screen.

Thanks to: TeachersLoveSmartBoards

Attended the production session for IWB animations for a video to be published in the IWB dossier of the Dutch CPD-site 'Leraar 24' [Teacher24] . Facinating to see how images and files are created for an approach in line with the 'in-plain-English'-format and customised for information on IWB-use in education by my ex-colleague Michel van Ast. The Teleac team members recorded the storyboard and will do the final editing to arrive at another informative and engaging videobite for teachers. Hopefully these prototypes are appreciated by the project manager that ordered them so that more content can be developed. We will make sure some of it will contain info relevant specifically for language teachers. We will keep you posted, of course :-)

Just to inform you that interesting IWB-use related issues are being discussed on the 'All Things IWB'-thread at the 2010 IATEFL Conference.

One of them is on teacher training. See one of the findings in this respect which we reported on in our 2008 metastudy:

[...]Implementation strategies that foster informal cooperation and a buddy approach have shown to be effective forms of professional development (Cuthell, 2006; Kennewell, 2004).

 Moss et al (2007: 59) also believe that an exploratory, trial-and-error approach where experiences are shared, co-ordinated by an enthusiastic colleague in their own school, is a more effective training model than the demonstration and training of a set of IWB techniques, for example drag-and-drop or hide-and-reveal. The more so because this latter model is based on the false assumption that there is well-defined and exhaustive body of knowledge of all the possible applications of the IWB technical features.

Training of board techniques must therefore be linked to educational theory and practice (Miller & Glover, 2007) and it is for this reason that Somekh et al. (2007) view accredited training programmes for trainers and teachers as indispensable

 Convinced of the relevance of pedagogically sound training we do hope we can realise the ITiLT project proposal that we submitted to the EU LifeLongLearning Programme. More info in this blogpost.

With a view to the increase in IWB use in education and the importance of training language teachers to become confident users that can fully benefit from the pedagogical possibilities that IWB offers, the project Interactive Technologies in Language Teaching (ITiLT) will support language teachers in primary, secondary, vocational and higher education to gain the ability to critically evaluate the integration of IWBs in the classroom in a way that it: a) matches their communicative teaching methodology and b) motivates the learner and enhances their capacity for language learning.

To this end a website with so-called learning objects will be developed that will help teachers to develop and analyse methods for integrating IWBs in their language classroom.

A learning object consists of the following elements:

• video clips of classroom interactions with IWBs b) learner, teacher and trainer feedback (audio, video or text commentary)
• related resources (lesson plans, short descriptions of lessons, learner/teacher resources)

The approach is somewhat similar to that taken in the FICTUP project

All ITiLT-deliverables, among which IWB-materials and annotated references to external relevant repositories for a variety of languages such as English, French, German, Spanish, Turkish and Welsh will be publicly available.

 The proposal is widely supported as evidenced by an impressive list of Associate partners, among which the EU Headquarters of Activboard and SMARTboard!

A recent Dutch study 'Engels met digibord of boek' [English with IWB or Book] aimed to research daily practice and added value of IWB-use in primary EFL education. To this end the authors (Marjolijn Hovius, Nico van Kessel, Meike van der Linden) compared the way teachers used the course materials 'Take it easy' (especially designed for IWB-use) with a recently published textbook 'Real English New' which is largely paperbased with some digital support.

Some first observations (from a really quick scan!) and driven by my interest focus on professional development.

1) Let's start with the learning results: not a huge difference in results between experimental  and control groups, but then the period between pre- and posttest was rather short!

2) Pupils loved the IWB supported materials. Teachers, too, are really enthousiastic about using the IWB. FYI, teacher education for EFL teaching in NL primary education is very basic so teachers appreciate very much that the materials can support educational activities such as oral presentation of new content and pronunciation training as they feel less comfortable with those themselves.
And for this reason pupils benefit as their learning space is much improved.

3) More teacher training is needed to actually use the opportunities the IWB materials offer to serve different needs within the pupil groups.

4) At the end of the day the teacher is still KEY, despite the support 'the digital teacher' definitely offers.

The observations on the potential of peer-to-peer learning for teachers match well with findings (Lewin et al., 2009) based on data from a longitudinal research study (the UK Primary School Whiteboard Expansion Project) reporting on the success of informal learning communities in schools.

Which means even more evidence for one of the arguments we put forward in our current application for a European project on IWBs in Language Education. (BTW deadline 31 March!!, I should NOT be spending time writing this post now, more possibly later :-))

Reference:
Cathy Lewin, Peter Scrimshaw, Bridget Somekh and Maureen Haldane (2009). The impact of formal and informal professional development opportunities on primary teachers' adoption of interactive whiteboards. Technology, Pedagogy and Education. Vol. 18 No. 2, July 2009, 173-185 

Experimental research at The Digital Learning Classroom shows that mathematial and reading skills of English Language Learners (ELL) can be improved using interactive whiteboardtechnology.

An objective of the evaluation was to determine the extent IWB technology could foster performance parity in academic achievement between ELL and regular students, that is, reduce the student achievement gap between these two student groups in 3rd and 5th grade mathematics and reading.

A second evaluation objective was to determine whether and the extent to which the Digital Learning Classroom could increase ELL students’ academic learning relative to that of ELL students in traditional classrooms (i.e., without IWBs).
Pedagogical implications for teachers of ELL students within the context of Digital Learning Classroom project implementation are presented, as well as recommendations for future study of the Digital Learning Classroom in ELL classroom settings.

Full text version of Omar S. López' study is available at Science Direct here .

The site for and by MFL teachers at the UK Sunderland Schools website offers interesting resources for Modern Languages.

 Also included are a number of zipped files for French and Spanish developed for use on the Promethean ActivBoard.
Among the themes and topics covered are subjects like 'giving directions', 'parts of the body' and various grammatical issues.