IWB+for+Literacy

toc = = = IWB Ideas for Literacy =

** Writing **
Write some text with missing punctuation such as commas, full stops, nouns, etc. Ask the pupils to fill in the gaps with the pen.

Use a tool like Toondo http://www.toondoo.com/Home.toon to create a comic online. They use this as an introduction to getting students to make their own cartoon online.

Take a sequence of digital photographs depicting the various stages in making a pizza. Put these images onto an IWB page. Ask pupils to sequence them to show the correct order. They then write an instruction sheet for making a pizza.

Use photos as a cue for writing a story. See http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=stories for some great stories based on photos. Careful of Flickr if young kids free search.

Use inspiration to brainstorm ideas to create a story. Choose an image for motivation then write down ideas such as: genre, characters, setting, events, endings.

[|Cloze] procedure. Fill in the gaps using words from a word wall, or by writing the words using the pen. Very easy to set up. Alternately, use some of the online versions such as http://www.windmillworks.com/gamesonline/index.html which has 4 different levels of Cloze Exercises.

A team of students can use clip art or images from the IWB software’s resource library to tell a digital story. You could make it the basis of an exercise to create a digital book.

Use a site like Edublogs http://edublogs.org/ to set up a classroom blog. Link to a picture that is topical of the day’s news. Have a student or team of students type some text and paste it onto the blog entry. Maybe a compilation of a group of students writings will tell the story comprehensively.

Run a timetable of students and ask them to do a 5 Minute news report for the class complete with sport and weather. Make sure that they have it prepared ahead of time on the IWB software and use the capabilities of animation etc.

You can use object order to make activities that have words going behind or in front of an object to allow for “answers to be revealed”. You can use the alternate techniques to do things like erase a colour fill to reveal an answer or even use an award reveal tool.

Use the commenting tool in word to teach students how to comment on each other’s writing. Use this as a model to share some collaborative writing around the classroom.

Use Voicethread [|http://www.voicethread.com]. to get students to explore the powerful combination of Voice, Text and Image combined.

Link classrooms in two different continents via wikispaces and divide up tasks for each under groups as in http://flatplanet.wikispaces.com or spintheglobe

Scan pages of a text into the IWB software and get students to mark up pages with comments to explain characterisation etc.

Use mindmapping software like inspiration to get students to develop outlines for essay writing and then copy the outline to a shared folder for all students to continue writing work on.

Use the additional resources on sites like [|http://classtools.net] to structure essays, use fishbone scaffolds and much more.

Use the IWB to check out Evaluation Station http://www.eduplace.com/kids/hme/6_8/evalstation/index.html for allowing kids to get feedback on the different styles of essay that they write then get them to evaluate the final on the IWB against the guidelines.

** Reading **
Use text of a book on the board and annotate as appropriate. You can also pick out parts of the text and drag between split screens and/or separate sections for highlighting. Use audio resources such as http://[|www.littogo.com], http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic93.htm or audible http://[|www.audible.com] to allow students to listen to sections of books being read.

Use audio, video and images to get students to recreate passages of a text on the board to show understanding of what they understood from their reading. Just asking them to “Choose 3 images that illustrate the passage” can be really powerful.

Match half words by joining together. This is a useful method for testing understanding of suffixes and prefixes, vowel clusters in spelling and other similar tasks.

Get the students to develop a weekly podcast of what is happening in your classroom. Insist that they prepare properly by writing and reading from a script.

** Speaking and listening **
Have students create notebook files of interactive pages where they use their voice as the voices of characters on the pages.

Investigate dialogue by using a sequence of pages showing images of people and speech bubbles. Pupils can write directly into the speech bubbles. This can either be done with the IWB software, with the notebooks using Comic Life on the mac or with Toondo http://www.toondoo.com/Home.toon

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