From the previous post, you have read that I would do an art lesson using the IWB today. It was my first time using an IWB but thankfully the students helped me out a lot. I decided to use the smart board because I would be able to visually present the work of an artist, ask students to come up and create drawings, cater for visual and aural learners and also the IWB session made a great use of time while the under painting dried.
Firstly, students were asked to under paint their art paper blue or green as the theme for today's art lesson was the ocean. While the papers were left to dry, I asked the students to sit with a clipboard, A4 paper and a pencil ready for the IWB lesson. We started with learning about an artist and students were able to click on his website and explore his gallery of art works. While looking at the pieces, students were asked to note patterns, motifs and fish shapes. The IWB enabled me to show the students step by step drawings of a fish, I added my own motifs and students were asked to come up and fill the fish with motifs or symbols that represented the ocean. It was great to see all hands were up and willing to participate. The last slide of the Smart notebook had an interactive game where students had to match information of the artist and terms and definitions. Students helped each other out and read out the information together at the end. Students had to do draft versions of their final art work before proceeding to paint.
It was a successful first attempt at using the Smart board and my cooperating teacher commented on how engaged the students were and how organised the timing was of the painting and IWB lesson. I think that the students benefited from learning about the artist's intentions, motivation and techniques as well as viewing other student's work before attempting to create their own motif fish painting. If this was my first attempt at a smart board lesson and not being very tech savvy myself, more teachers should give it a try. There are endless templates and even pre made notebook tutorials and files online to choose from. The possibilities are endless and I am looking forward to incorporating the IWB into my future lessons.
Yen Hoang, a great start to using the IWB. Did you get a chance to teach other lessons- or see your teacher use it- what were these about?
ReplyDeleteI did have a chance to use it again. It was a lesson on buildings and bridges. There were two objectives to the lesson. First was to inform students about famous buildings. The second was to allow students to decide what information was relevant in terms of its content and reliability or where it came from. I showed the class videos from youtube, official sites and pictures from the internet. The activity involved the class to categorise the buildings into towers or skyscrapers, then to describe the materials, shapes, height, location and unique information about the buildings that they could get from the videos. We compared the Eiffel Tower, Centre Point Tower and The Empire State building. Students also discussed the sources of information. Questions such as, how long is this video?, Did a tourist or professional take the video? How old is the information presented? and can we verify the sources with official facts and figures? Overall I think it was a successful lesson where the children were actively engaged and listening for key information. The IWB provide a very valuable space where students could access a variety of information sources in a lesson that was not entirely a teacher directed one.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, as I have said before, my cooperating teacher said that she has never used the board in her 30 years of teaching nor does she plan to. The only other IWB lesson I had a look at was with the Librarian and again students were engaged and actively learning.