Friday, November 11, 2005
Post raya and IWB
Having recovered from the raya feast now I'm back in Canterbury and hope to spend the last few weeks of my sabbatical here buried in work.
I'm still fighting the jet lag, hopefully by tomorrow I would be back to normal. My first day at work today was to attend the training on smart baord given to 20 High level teacher assisstants. These teacher assistants are attending 20 hours of training to qualify. They come to campus once a week. Today they are presented with the ICT components of their training. They learned to sign in to the CCCU IT services, learn about the smartbaord and the blackboard.
The trainer Nyree spent about 25 mins with 10 of them at a time. Though the time was short but it was useful as an introduction. Most of them have seen a whiteboard before in their schools and some have had experience in using them.
After the demonstration the trainees spent about an hour to explore the smart notebook software. They were impressed with the ease that they learned to use the software. They particularly liked the gallery. It makes their work a lot easier if they know how to access the many templates and activities that are available in the galleries. They were also impressed with the capture (camera) tool, which they tried to capture pictures from the web and saved them to the notebook pages.
I learned something new today, that you can move the object on the screen by tapping on it and tapping another part of the board where you want it to go. Hard to describe this though.
Though the interactive whiteboard has been around more than five years in some schools in UK, teachers are still learning to use it. One of the assistants told me that she helps a maths teacher in her school with ICT use, since the teacher has no time to learn new skills. She is keen to learn more how to use the IWB so that she can help the teacher.
An interesting observation... most of these teacher assistants are mothers who chose to be in schools because they want to help their children. They get to know what is happening in their children's schools and get to be with them during schools and holidays. Wish I could do that too... though according to the mothers the pay is not much, but they get the satisfaction that they are involved in their children's education.
I'm still fighting the jet lag, hopefully by tomorrow I would be back to normal. My first day at work today was to attend the training on smart baord given to 20 High level teacher assisstants. These teacher assistants are attending 20 hours of training to qualify. They come to campus once a week. Today they are presented with the ICT components of their training. They learned to sign in to the CCCU IT services, learn about the smartbaord and the blackboard.
The trainer Nyree spent about 25 mins with 10 of them at a time. Though the time was short but it was useful as an introduction. Most of them have seen a whiteboard before in their schools and some have had experience in using them.
After the demonstration the trainees spent about an hour to explore the smart notebook software. They were impressed with the ease that they learned to use the software. They particularly liked the gallery. It makes their work a lot easier if they know how to access the many templates and activities that are available in the galleries. They were also impressed with the capture (camera) tool, which they tried to capture pictures from the web and saved them to the notebook pages.
I learned something new today, that you can move the object on the screen by tapping on it and tapping another part of the board where you want it to go. Hard to describe this though.
Though the interactive whiteboard has been around more than five years in some schools in UK, teachers are still learning to use it. One of the assistants told me that she helps a maths teacher in her school with ICT use, since the teacher has no time to learn new skills. She is keen to learn more how to use the IWB so that she can help the teacher.
An interesting observation... most of these teacher assistants are mothers who chose to be in schools because they want to help their children. They get to know what is happening in their children's schools and get to be with them during schools and holidays. Wish I could do that too... though according to the mothers the pay is not much, but they get the satisfaction that they are involved in their children's education.
# posted by Maznah @ 11:02 AM 
