Resources
My History
I am a Head of an ICT department in a secondary (11-18) high school. In 2003 I started using an Interactive Whiteboard in my classroom and four years later the entire school (80 rooms) was equipped with IWBs, a considerable expense considering each board cost in the region of £1000.
When I saw Johnny Chung Lee's youTube video demonstrating cheap IWB technology I was sceptical. However, as it was so cheap I thought why not, so I nicked (borrowed) one of my niece's Wii remote controllers but as an infrared pen was the only piece of equipment that I couldn't easily lay my hand on I used the TV remote (more moaning resulted as I was doing my testing during something called X-Factor!), this proved to me that this was a feasible alternative and a substantially cheaper one so I set about finding some infrared pens. I couldn't so I created a few, then sold a few to colleagues and before long we have arrived at the current situation where having gone into business with my friend Don we have a company that can supply you with everything Wii Whiteboard related...and if we don't have it ask us, we can usually find it (or make it).
Presentation Software
In this section I intend placing software and other resources that we have found, or that have been suggested to us, that might be useful in the classroom.
- Sankore - Free IWB software
- Snip (worth reminding ourselves about the tools built in to Windows - I have this on my taskbar and it makes quick grabs and annotations easy)
- PowerPoint - right-click on any slide and you enter ink mode, which allows you to annotate the current slides (annotations can be saved in the presentation)
- SmoothBoard - Software built for use with the Wii remote technology, includes software to connect the Wii remote to the computer.
- NSH Presenter - Software built for use with the Wii remote technology, includes software to connect the Wii remote to the computer.
- Wink - not so much a current screen annotator as a recorder (open-source)
- Screenmarker - a little piece of software that lets you make annotations on your computer screen.
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