Whiteboard in action
Pre-School Category
Cauldeen Nursery Class,
Inverness
Project Description:
'SmartNet Access'
Cauldeen Primary School Nursery has published its own website which hosts links for children and for parents. By introducing an interactive whiteboard into the nursery, this project aims to explore the ways in which very young children use the whiteboard to engage with the online activities available through the nursery's own website. The project will also invite parents to share in their children's learning using the technology and to access links on the nursery's website which offer information and guidance on parenting nursery age children.
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Final Report: June 2002
At the time of the innovation application we were in the process of producing our nursery website and had discovered lots of fantastic web sites with activities suitable for four year olds that could be carried out online. It occurred to us that the online painting activities and many of the games would not only benefit from the large screen of a Smartboard, but would allow children who did not have the fine motor control skills and hand eye co-ordination to manipulate an on screen cursor to be able to complete the activities using touch. There was also the obvious motivational factor of interacting directly with the screen.We were so delighted with the innovation award that within minutes of the phone call telling us the good news we had our ordered the Smartboard and projector. We actually had the board set up and ready to go before the cheque was in the post!
Smartboards
For those who have not seen a Smartboard in action, a P.C. is connected to a projector and to a whiteboard. The projector displays the computer screen image onto the board. The computer can then be controlled by using a pen or finger on the board, which is touch sensitive. Interactive whiteboards obviously lend themselves well to whole class teaching and have been trialled in a number of classrooms with great success.Magic fingers
The children loved using their 'magic fingers' on the board and were mesmerized watching other children use it. Initially we used the online painting activities from the BBC website and the children were delighted with the pictures of Bob the Builder, The Tweenies (and lots more!) that they were able to produce.The children also enjoyed simple matching games, which would have required a lot of manual dexterity on an ordinary computer. The immediate reaction to their touch was also a highly motivating factor. They were also fascinated by the pens, and the ability to draw with their fingers on top of any of the programmes.
Benefits for Learners
We found huge learning benefits for the nursery children - in particular the motivational aspect of using a magic finger!! Activities that worked particularly well were those activities where children could manipulate the text with their fingers i.e. unjumbling words or sentences, adding onsets to rimes, putting rhyming words into groups etc. The advantage being that usually these activities would involve either a lot of writing or cutting and pasting.The benefits have also extended far beyond our original plans. The Nursery children still have access to the whiteboard, but it has now been set up in a primary 1 / 2 classroom and the P1 / 2 teacher has been excellent at using the board creatively throughout the whole department. Children right across the infant department have now benefited from the equipment.
The equipment has proved extremely popular with the children for a variety of activities and so popular with the teachers they have requested that it be set up in a communal area so they can have access to it as a whole class teaching tool as well as it being available as an activity that classroom assistants could do with small groups.
Overcoming problems
One of the main drawbacks of the Smartscreen was the shadows cast on the screen by the children. The children quickly learned to position themselves so as not to cast a shadow over their own work but were not so good at not casting a shadow over what somebody else was doing. Unfortunately at the moment a rear projection system, which would eliminate this problem, is substantially more expensive.The actual positioning of the projector was not really a problem as it was possible to screen it in such a way that the children were unlikely to knock it over and in fact this never happened (despite initial fears!). A rug was placed over the trailing leads to lessen the chances of children tripping over them when standing in front of the board. We also found it difficult to let children with Special Needs in wheelchairs access the screen, as it was hard for them to position themselves away from their shadow. However, we soon learned that this could be resolved by allowing them to use a soft tipped pointer.
Positive feedback from parents
Nursery parents were invited in to our computer suite to explore the nursery web site - hopefully encouraged by their four year olds experiences! We had underestimated the number of parents with Internet access as most had already accessed the site, however the parents who hadn't were extremely positive about the experience.An ICT workshop was also held for parents to show the sort of activities they could be doing with their children. This was very popular and all parents attending felt they would like workshops to develop their own confidence. They were amazed to discover the amount of activities that could be carried out with their pre- school children online and the number of games and activities that they could download without buying expensive software.
Nursery Staff
A similar workshop was held for local nurseries with a phenomenal turnout - showing the amount of interest in this sort of new technology and the need for demonstrations, information, ideas etc. In fact the Pre- School Development officer has asked me to hold similar demonstrations to her network groups throughout the region. Many nursery staff had never seen a whiteboard in action and were very enthusiastic about the benefits. A huge benefit is that due to the size of the screen and the ability in SmartNotepad to hide all the toolbars children are not able to access any other options by mistake - the commonest complaint from nursery staff was that they would set up the computer for a task only to return and find the children had accessed all sorts of other things!Next Steps
We plan to set up the whiteboard so that groups of both nursery and infants can access it and our teachers can utilise it as a whole class teaching tool. We shall look into the possibility of acquiring another board to use throughout the upper school with a view to building up a range of activities, software etc. as we have done for the infants.We are looking forward to trying lots of different activities as we have only scratched the surface of what is available on the world wide web!
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Contact Details
Sandra Nesbitt
Cauldeen Primary School Nursery
Mackay Road
Inverness
IV2 4HZ
tel: 01463 235905
snesbitt@hcs.uhi.ac.uk
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