Ideas for an IWB…

…or a projector!

I shared these ideas and links with colleagues at my school during a 45-minute workshop. They are meant to help us all get more use out of our electronic whiteboards, which are sometimes only used as an oversize television, or at best a way to access Google. I presented four tools, and demonstrated a couple of ways to use each of them. Since I’m not too confident with the pen functions of our IWBs, and the calibration needs to be redone quite regularly, all of these tools could equally well be used with projector too.

PowerPoint

Not just a presentation tool! PowerPoint is actually very versatile, and is great for vocabulary revision games. There are many templates on the web which are (relatively) easy to download and adapt. I have also written a post showing you how to make two games: one for hidden pictures and the other flashing pictures up quickly for students to remember vocabulary.

Triptico

Triptico is my favourite IWB tool because it is versatile, easy to use, constantly updated, and best of all, free! David has created a video showing how to use a lot of the tools within Triptico. I shared my ideas for using Triptico here and recorded a video showing you how to download it and use word magnets, although it’s a little out-of-date. This is what Triptico looks like now, and there are about twice as many functions as there were a year ago when I made the video:

#eltpics

To declare an interest, I am one of the curators of the Flickr #eltpics site and it is something I am very proud to be a part of. Teachers, writers and other interested parties from all over the world share photos on Twitter, including the #eltpics hashtag in their tweets. A group of us then upload them to Flickr, where they are then available for anybody to use in classroom materials or on blogs, with no need to worry about copyright restrictions. There are only two conditions: that you attribute the photos to the photographer (their name is under each picture) and that you do not make any money from anything featuring the images. At the time of writing, we have just topped 8000 images divided into 66 sets, and we also take requests for topics or types of image which people would like us to add. You can see the 10 most recently uploaded #eltpics at the bottom of the right-hand column on this blog.

How to join in

How to download the photos

Ideas for using the photos – blog

I also shared Big Huge Labs excellent mosaic maker and captioner, which are a great to use with #eltpics. You could use the captioner as a way to revise or introduce a particular piece of language. Here’s a picture I added captions too. It was taken by Ian James (@ij64):

Quizlet

Quizlet is an online flashcards site, where you can search for content which has already been created, or make your own flashcards. The scatter and space race functions are both great for an IWB/projector. I have written a complete guide to Quizlet over on my blog for students.

Further reading

Here are a few other posts I have written with ideas or tips which might also be useful:

• Easy Technology for the EFL Classroom
• Teaching 2.0 in the One-Computer Classroom
• Tools for the 21st-century teacher
• Go online: getting your students to use Internet resources
• Twitter for Professional Development (almost all of the ideas shared here are ones which I found out about through Twitter)

Chiew Pang has a series of games on his blog, which are very good for specific purposes:

• Places in a town
• Pronunciation of regular past simple
• Irregular past simple
• Jigsaw puzzles, including one for adjectives of feeling

Phil Bird has written a post about SmartNotebook tools and activities.

Gareth Davies has a whole blog dedicated to IWBs called ‘Interactive Whiteboards made simple’.

If you have any other ideas, please leave them in the comments.

Enjoy!