SMARTBoards, Whiteboards, Web boards
Thursday, March 1st, 2007– kindergarten day school student
Interactive whiteboards, such as SMARTboards, are becoming increasingly popular among Jewish schools and other educational organizations. The white board surface is basically a very large mouse pad that tracks touch movement. Content is projected onto the whiteboard from a computer monitor. What makes these whiteboards interactive is the ability to drag, type, annotate, highlight, save material, and otherwise manipulate it using a special set of pens, or one’s finger as the mouse. SMARTBoard provides Notebook software which includes content area templates and allows users to create material specifically for the whiteboard.
Whiteboards can be used for general and Judaic studies. Any software applications, including Judaic and Hebrew language software that run on a computer can be used with a whiteboard. In general, these interactive whiteboards have the ability to convert handwritten text into digital text for Latin-based alphabets only. However, Hebrew and other non-Latin-based languages can be saved as images.
Do you have resources that you would like to share with other schools or educational organizations? We are piloting a project at jlearn2.0 to help collect and disseminate lessons designed for Jewish educational settings, particularly those developed for electronic whiteboards. We are using the jlearn2.0 wiki to house this information for the time being. If you have developed resources for Jewish educational settings and would like to share them with colleagues, please feel free to post them to the jlearn2.0 wiki. Be in touch with us if you have trouble posting. We anticipate that most people will be posting files that use Notebook software.
When you post, we ask that you include the name of the project and information about the suggested grade level, subject area, a brief description of the activity included intended learning outcomes and recommended usage, and your contact information. Please also include your name or the person to whom the material should be attributed. By posting online, you acknowledge that you own the rights to the material.
In addition, take a look at these web-based white boards and play around with them. They can be used for online collaborative projects, note taking, and brainstorming:
Imagination Cubed: www.imaginationcubed.com
skrbl: www.skrbl.com