“How to…..

Use a promethean board to enhance your teaching and

learning”

Name: ____________________

Contents:

1. “5 things to do to get going”: Page: 1 - 2

2. Promethean Top Tips: Page: 3 - 8

3. Basic Tools and Ways to use them in your lessons: Page: 9 - 12

4. Digital Leaders feedback Page: 13 - 15

5 things to do to get going:

1. Join Promethean Planet

Promethean Planet hosts a wealth of resources (http://www.prometheanplanet.com/en/resources/) for all teachers. It's not just for Promethean users. You'll find PowerPoint presentations, worksheets and other resources. If you are an ActivInspire user, then the ready-made flipcharts and resource packs will also prove to be invaluable. Use them 'as-is' or treat them as a starting point for your own lesson materials and adapt to your own needs.

2. Invest in a large USB stick

With the software installed on your own computer, it's easy to prepare lessons at home and bring them into school on a USB stick. It's probably best to then copy the files to your user area at school and run from there rather than running them directly from your stick. This also means you have a backup copy in case you accidentally make changes.

3. Sign up for Dropbox

Dropbox is a free service that gives you some space in "The Cloud" for file storage. It creates a folder on your home computer, which you can copy files into. Those files then get uploaded to your private space. You can access those files from anywhere via the Dropbox website.

4. Start with the basics

Don't try to overload yourself with all the possible bells and whistles that your whiteboard software can do. Familiarise yourself with the basic tools that you can use every day and be happy in how to use them.

Be sure you know how to use the following tools:

Pen / Eraser – being able to handwrite on the board like you would on a regular whiteboard is an essential skill. Look for the colour palette to change the pen colour, and also the pen thickness. The eraser will rub out everything written in pen, it won't remove shapes or text. Write a little larger and slower than you normally would. Don't worry if you run out of space on the board, you can either make the writing smaller after you've written it, or just go to another page. You can have as many pages as you want, so don't try to cram everything on to one.

Selection tool – use this tool when you want to interact with something: move something on the page or make it bigger/smaller. Click on the selection tool and then tap on an object to bring up the blobs that let you stretch/rotate/move it about.

Text – when preparing a flipchart, it's better to type in the text than try to write with a mouse. Simply click on the text tool then click on the page to add a text box. You'll have the usual text formatting tools that you're used to in Word. You

can also copy and paste text in exactly the same way that you can in something like PowerPoint. Each text box can be moved on its own – you can use this to build matching activities: put single words in their own box and definitions in other ones; students can then match the words to the definitions.

Shapes – there will be plenty of ready-made shapes that you can use to create tables, Venn diagrams, etc. Use the paint bucket tool to fill them in with colour. Have a play and see what is available. Often you'll find speech bubbles, which are good to use when introducing lesson objectives. Also think about how you can hide parts of the screen under shapes – maybe important words or parts of an image – use the selection tool to move the shapes when you are ready to reveal whatever is hiding behind them.

5. Check the gallery

Most IWB software comes with a gallery of ready-made clipart and other resources that can be quickly added to your own lesson resources.

In ActivInspire, you will find these in the Resource Browser.

Promethean Top Tips

Tip 1: Organise yourself

Keep separate folders for each class, and separate flipcharts for each topic. This makes orgainising, finding, duplicating and sharing easier.

Tip 2: Get arty-farty

Use the thinner pen settings for outlines, and colour in with the highlighter. Students pick this up easily:

Select colour

Preset thickness of pen

Custom pen width

pen

highlighter

rubber

lines

‘clear all annotations’ – wipes all pen marks

Undo (when it goes wrong!)

Tip 3: Import screenshots to preserve the appearance of Word or any other program

From your flip chart, click on ‘Desktop Tools’. This returns you to the desktop, hides the flipchart, and gives you a wheel in the middle of the screen.

Hover over the centre, and it will bring up the functions:

Here, I have selected the ‘Area Snapshot’ tool, which will allow me to take a picture of a rectangle of whatever is on my desktop, and import it into my current slide, or a new one.

Tip 4: Cover up and reveal

This will help you to structure a lesson, pose key questions at a set point, or create quick ‘cloze’ type exercises.

Use the reveal tool to put a blind over the page, and reveal from top, bottom or sides – useful in a linear text like a poem.

The blind will remain even after you go to the next page, so remember to click off it.

Use the ‘shape’ button to place shapes on top of text or images

Use the ‘Spotlight’ to black out everything except section, and ask questions with a tighter focus.

There are various shapes that you can spotlight. See ‘Change user defined buttons’ below.

Tip 5: Import an existing Powerpoint or PDF

This quite straight forward:

From the File menu, select ‘Import’, and the ‘PowerPoint as Images’. You will prompted to find the location of the ppt, so make sure you know where it is! Importing this way will bring in each slide as a background image on a page, and is by far the simplest and easiest to use.

If you select ‘PowerPoint as Objects’, each slide will go to a new page, and each obect from each slide will be an editable object that can be resized or deleted as you wish.

To import a PDF, just select if from the same menu.

Tip 6: change the user defined buttons to suit you

From the main menu, select ‘Tools’, then ‘More Tools’, and then ‘Edit User Defined Buttons’.

From the ‘Commands’, you can edit all the buttons that appear in the toolbox at the side of the flipchart.

In the left hand column, you see the available buuttons, and in the right you see the buttons that appear in the toolbox – in the order that they appear, from top to bottom.

Select a button you want, and click ‘Add>>’ to put it in your toolbox. Then select it in the right hand column, and click ‘Move Up’ or ‘Move Down’ until it’s exactly where you want it.

Tip 7: Print a few pages for students who are away (or create a PDF)

From the ‘File’ menu, select ‘Print’ to bring up this menu:

On ‘Page Settings’ you can change from landscape to portrait

Select ‘Current’ under ‘Page Range’, or select the range of pages you want to print.

To create a PDF, simply click ‘Export to PDF’ instead of ‘Print’.

PDFs can be easily posted to the internet, or emailed. Any student or teacher should be abl;e to read them without Promethean software.

Tip 8: Use a tickertape to create a ‘settler’ activity

This is an eeasy way to create a scrolled message on your screen. If you like it, you can make sure the buttton is on your toolbox

From ‘Tools’, select ‘More Tools’, then ‘Tickertape’.

From the box that pops up, select and edit the message, colour, speed.

The tickertape will continue scrolling until you stop it!

Tip 9: Import pictures

If the picture is in a file, simply line the file up next to the Flipchart, and drag and drop.

If the picture is on the internet, right click and ‘copy’. In the Flipchart, with the ‘Select’ arrow rather than the pen, right click and paste.

To resize, use one of the corners to preserve the formatting – rather than squishing it!

Tip 10: Use handwriting recognition

Press CTRL + Shift + H to switch it on and off, or this symbol on the toolbox , and then write. If you pause, it will turn your handwriting into type. If you pause mid sentence, it will take whatever you got up to – which can be annoying! It works well for single word mindmaps, and students love using it. If it has trouble recognising a word, it wil give you a drop down menu with some options.

becomes

Useful shortcuts

CTRL + P Print (as in most programs)

CTRL + S Save (as in most programs)

CTRL + B toggles the page browser

F6 brings up the desktop tools

CTRL + SHIFT + A brings up the desktop annotation tool – or use button on menu bar

Basic Tools and Ways to use them in your lessons:

Those five tools are:

Freehand pen

Text

Shapes

Eraser

Images (via copy/paste, screen capture tool or from the gallery)

With just these tools, there are so many things you can do. Also handy would be to know how to group shapes together and to lock some objects on the page so they can't be moved by accident.

1. Drag and Drop #1 – Matching Words

This is a very simple activity to use at any stage of a lesson to check on understanding. These are simply text boxes that then need to be matched up.

To speed things up, I created one blue box and one yellow box using the shapes tool and then added text. I then cloned these boxes several times (or copy/paste) to get many identical boxes. Finally, I changed the text in each one.

There are lots of ways to use this idea. The boxes could contain words and their definitions, beginnings and ends of sentences, opposites, dates and events, or words in one language and their corresponding words in English.

The boxes can be dragged together to match up, or lines can be drawn to pair them up.

As an extension, have a whole load of different words in boxes for sentence rearranging or fridge magnet poetry.

2. Drag and Drop #2 – Sequencing

This is built in the same way as the matching activity above, except that the boxes are larger and contain longer sentences or phrases. The lesson activity involves putting these sentences into the correct order based on either a story or a set of

events. This could be a historical timeline or stages in a story. For example, the key stages in a Shakespeare play.

Another idea is to write the steps of a practical task, such as a science experiment or food technology task, in the boxes. To check that the students understand what they need to do next, ask them to order the steps on the whiteboard. Once in the correct order, the steps can stay displayed on the whiteboard while the students carry out the task.

You can also include statements that the students need to rank in order of importance or say whether they strongly agree/disagree with. In these tasks, there may not be a correct answer as such, but the task acts as a stimulus for discussion.

3. Drag and Drop #3 – Sorting

This activity relies on the screen being split into several columns with text boxes placed at the bottom. The words can be dragged into the correct columns. The example in the image is more complicated than it needs to be as I have made a table out of several boxes; you could simply draw a line down the middle of the screen and it will work just as well.

The obvious alternative is to use two circles to create a Venn diagram.

4. Drag and Drop #4 – Matching Words and Pictures

If you can get pictures on to your flipchart page, then you can adapt the earlier matching example to include images.

In the example below, images were copied and pasted from the Internet or found in the clipart gallery and then text boxes were made with words in German. (As always when sourcing content from the Internet, remember to check the copyright.)

5. Drag and Drop #5 – The Plenary Circle

This is a simple idea for summarising what students have learnt at the end of a lesson. It consists simply of a large circle, with words arranged around the outside. All students get thinking time to come up with several sentences that start 'I know that ...' and then use two of the words to finish the sentence. Using the example shown, one possible sentence is 'I know that Metal is a Conductor'.

Select a few students to come to the board and pull two words in to the circle to share their sentences with the rest of the class.

6. Rub and Reveal

This is a very simple technique that relies on the fact that the eraser tool rubs out anything drawn with the pen tool, but does not rub out typed text. If you change the pen tool to have a thick line, and change the colour so that it matches the background of the page, then you can quickly make text disappear by simply drawing over it.

To bring it back, just use the eraser and rub out the pen, revealing the text.

This is a very quick way to make cloze activities (fill in the gaps) or to hide labels to a diagram, such as in the example shown.

This example also used the desktop capture tool to copy and paste an image from the Internet, which was then labelled. Arrows were drawn from the lines and shapes tool.

7. Anagram Keyword Games

This is a quick activity that can be used as a lesson starter or plenary to revise important keywords.

At its most simple level, this activity is made from blocks of text – one is an anagram of a keyword and the other is the correct answer; both are then covered by two filled rectangles.

In the example shown, I have added text to the two covering boxes so I can remember which is the anagram and which is the answer.

Digital Leaders feedback

Step1: ensure computer and promethean board are turned on.

Step2: load up the programme active inspire.

Step3: use the pens that were given to you (light grey is the student pen and the dark grey pen is the teacher pen which has main control of the board) to write draw and impress the students.

FAQ’s

You can make it more interesting with the optional step of adding a clock with a 'countdown' piece of music (I downloaded one from the Internet). With ActivInspire software, you can use the clock tool and have it count down.

1) Are there any options or tools that you wouldn’t know about at first? Yes one of them being the duel user which needs the 2 pens to use.

Instructions to get there: go to tools then click duel user then you and one of your students can now wright together

Other tools: hand writing recognition, shape recognition, reveller, spotlight, maths tools (includes dice roll and more) and finally camera shots.(together there is the same as duel user but by clicking something else.

2) Many teachers often run into a DE calibrated pen problem, this can be very annoying and usually stops the lesson from continuing, so to solve this, you must 1; find the small up arrow on the bottom right of the screen, it’s on the taskbar, click on it and find the promethean photo, then select it, the option to “calibrate” will appear, all you have to do is click that option then follow the onscreen instructions to successfully recalibrate the pen.

3) If you decide to be creative with your teaching, try adding a background to your work, to do this, select the insert tab on the top of the screen, then select page then select page then any

of the ones then select one of the options then select one of the squares with an image in.

(note; the designs will vary depending on which option you choose)

You will find that all of the text on the page says “Lorem ipsum”, this is simply dummy text and you do not need to worry about it, to change the text, you must enter “design mode” you can either press “f2” or select the edit tab at the top, then “design mode” you are then free to change the elements of the page as you wish.

4) If you wish to move something across the page (I.e. a shape or sentence) you must fisrt select the mouse tool (on the handy menu to the left or right of the screen) then simply drag whatever you want to reposition, if that does not work, you can double tap the object and a small menu will appear, select the cross and you should then be able to move the object around.

5) If you wish to time the classif they are doing questions, you must find the “tools” tab, then select “more tools” at the bottom of the list, then find the option “clock, a clock will appear in the middle of the screen, and you can you use the arrows on the bottom right of the clock screen to change how long you weant the stopwatch to go on for.

6) There is no triangular paper that we can find on the active inspire promethean boards

7) You can run programs through active engage you just have to use the desktop anotate button

8) To annotate over a webpage or any other work on the board, press the “desktop annotate” button (the board with the squiggle on it!)

9) You can anotate an imported power point but it is easier to just use desktop anotate

Help tips

If you keep clicking the new flipchart than you don’t get a new flip chart you just get a load of pages instead of a new flip chart.

The desktop annotate button goes back and forth from the desktop to the flipchart.

When you are about to write some thing on the board make sure the pen is selected

You can hide and reveal things with the revealer by going to tools tab and selecting revealer