For my ‘One Best Thing’ project from the 2015 Apple Distinguished Educators Institute, I wrote a little book about using Explain Everything as an interactive whiteboard (imaginatively titled ‘Using Explain Everything as an Interactive Whiteboard’).
As the book is now six years old, I’ve done a bit of a refresh, updating screenshots and converting it from an iBooks Author ‘iBook’ to an ePub in Pages.
It’s now been published and can be downloaded here. Enjoy!
As part of the Apple Distinguished Educator Institute last summer, we were all set the homework of creating some resources to share best practice with teachers. We were given three options to choose from: Community Engagement (ADEs collaborating with museums/libraries etc. to create resources), Lessons for the Classroom (an iTunes U course that demonstrates how iPad can work in the classroom) or One Best Thing (a multitouch book sharing one way that Apple technologies have made a difference in the classroom). For ADE newbies, we were recommended to do ‘One Best Thing’, so I decided to do one about using Explain Everything as an Interactive Whiteboard.
It’s quite a short book, but is now published on the iBook Store, so do take a look!
So, it’s been about a month since we’ve enforced using an iPad to teach with rather than the use of a ‘Smart’board. Some teachers love and some are not so sure. The keen ones tend to be those new to the school (and so perhaps expecting to have to do things differently than before) and those who hate it tend to be the old hands.
Here are some of the things people miss:
One solution to some of these problems is to add web browsers to Explain Everything and then add web timers designed for iPad. Handy!
To fix the other issues will probably involve getting decent whiteboards everywhere and installing new wifi.we shall see…
Kids have only been back in school for three days, but things seem to be going ok with the Great Smartboard Experiment.
Here are some things I’ve noticed:
I probably should do some more in-depth enquiries into what’s working for teachers, and what could work even better. In many ways this is quite a seismic change to classroom practice and I think it will need continuing vision-casting and support.
Today, as part of some INSET, I did some training with staff on how to use their iPads instead of their SMARTboards. It started off with some explanation of the reasons for the nice away from Notebook, and then some time exploring features of Explain Everything. We had two streams: one for those completely new to the app and those with a bit more experience.
I took the group who’d already had some training. These were the teachers who weren’t new to the school and so there was potentially resistance to this change. But I think people were reasonably open, particularly when fears were assuaged with cool things like importing/exporting to our school shared drive via WebDAV and “triple tap to overlap”. Oh, and capacitive styluses!
We shall see how it all goes as term begins…
As my fun treat for finishing term, I got to go back into school the next day and begin the great SMARTboard revolution. This involved going round to every Mac in the school and unplugging the USB cable (and in some cases, the USB-serial cable…these are seriously old boards), taking away the pens and completely uninstalling any SMART software on the computer (drivers, extras, Notebook software etc.). It felt good!
Reflecting on my passionate dislike for ‘smart’ boards (what an ironically misnamed product: I wonder how they’d take my preferred moniker of STUPIDboard?), I think it comes down to the fact that they’ve never really worked that well and have never really gotten any better:
But I cannot sit back and bask in my delight for too long, as the challenge of communicating/demonstrating/inspiring teachers about how an iPad can be the smart man’s smart board still stands.
As I’ve mentioned before, from September we are getting rid of SMART Notebook in our school and unplugging all the the SMARTboards. This is not a move without controversy and so there is a certain amount of vision-casting that will need to be done with staff to explain why this happening. To help me get my thinking straightened out with it all, I thought I would do a preemptive response to possible/probably questions about it all.
I don’t see what’s wrong with Notebook
In our school, about a quarter of the installed boards are so old that they are no longer supported by SMART and so don’t work. Another quarter are non-SMART interactive LCD displays that can’t be touch enabled and still use Notebook (due to licensing issues). Of the other half of boards that are reasonably new and should (in theory) work, a good proportion of them suffer from some damage to the surface which means they are pretty unusable on a day-to-day basis.
So the options are:
| Option | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Teachers already know what they’re doing. Previous years’ resources can be reused. | No or limited interactivity. Costs involved with updating Notebook software (which will inevitably need to be done following OSX upgrades) – an unknown, but could potentially be £kkk. |
| 2 | Teachers already know what they’re doing. Interactivity is restored. | Very expensive and means budget cannot be spent on other stuff, like more class sets of iPads. |
| 3 | Reliable interactive surface is the iPad. Can make use of all the power of the iPad in the classroom, through camera, microphone etc. Taking the school forward rather than sticking with a fading and disrupted technology that is the SMARTboard. | Teachers have to learn a new tool. Previous years’ resources cannot easily be reused. Potential opposition from staff! |
Ok, so I can see that we need to make a change. But can’t we just keep Notebook anyway?
What is interesting is that we’ve had a year of this situation, and only a few teachers have taken up using an iPad instead of Notebook on the Mac. Teachers are busy people who have got plenty of other things to think about, and I guess tweaking your pedagogy to incorporate new technology isn’t high on the list of priorities. But if we don’t make a move, we may suddenly hit a brick wall in the future. Say, for example, Notebook 11 doesn’t work on OSX Yosemite come Autumn. Do we hold back our Macs to keep Notebook working? Or pay lots of money for licensing the newer Notebook?
What’s so great about using a mirrored iPad and Explain Everything?
How can I write?
Classrooms have all got some other form of whiteboard/flipchart if you want to do some proper modelled writing. But for scribing stuff, we’re investing in some proper capacitive styluses for teachers to use.
How can I share files across my year group?
We have a webDAV server that is accessible in and outside of school using the normal secure logins. This allows you to open Explain Everything files from the shared drive and export them back there again.
What if I desperately need to open a Notebook file from previous years?
SMART have an online version of Notebook at http://express.smarttech.com where you can open files from your computer.
As I have mentioned before, our school is ditching SMART Notebook from September.
But since that decision was made, we discovered a cool new feature in the iOS version of Keynote. The feature is officially called ‘highlighter’, which basically adds the ability to write with your finger when you are presenting mode. There has always been a laser pointer when you tap and hold, but now a set of coloured pens appear as well. You choose the colour you want and can then write where you wish. Instead of swiping between slides, you now get some arrow buttons on the left and right of the screen to change slide. All of you annotations stay even if you change slide, but they disappear when the slideshow ends.
The particularly cool thing about this is that there is now another alternative to Notebook on iPad if all you want is slides and the ability to write on them. The other cool thing is that, because of iWork file compatibility, you can make your Keynote slides on your Mac (or even on iCloud on a PC) and then use them for teaching on your iPad. This is good for those teachers who don’t feel they will be as fast making slides on ExplainEverything because they have to be created on the iPad itself. (I personally don’t think it’s any slower, but I guess it makes the transition easier.) And with iCloud, the slides should ‘just’ be there (in theory!).
Here’s a slightly provocative screenshot:
So, it’s been decided that from September 2014, Smartboards will be no more in our school. The physical boards themselves will remain (as they are pretty good data projector screens), as will the speakers and projectors, but the USB cables will be ceremoniously removed from the Macs and Notebook software will be aggressively uninstalled from every Mac in the school.
Instead, teachers will be encouraged to use ExplainEverything, or even just Keynote (on Mac or iPad). Or in fact anything they like. If they just want a set of slides, Keynote will do the trick, and if they want interactivity, a mirrored iPad + stylus will suffice. And if they want to just do some writing, there’s always a whiteboard and dry wipe pen!
Why the big move?
Well, for a long time I have had a particular dislike for Smartboards. They are very expensive for what they are (a giant touchpad) and they never really work properly (always needing aligning, and once the surface gets damaged, are useless for writing). The Notebook software for the Mac isn’t really the greatest of Mac citizens, and using a giant but not always accurate touch interface to control OSX isn’t always very pleasant. Apple has long realised that a touch interface needs a different user interface (as have Microsoft to a certain degree), but Smartboards seem to just try and fudge the issue.
Now that we have iPads, and the ability to mirror the display to the Smartboard display (via Reflector App), it in many ways removes the need for a Smartboard. The interactive surface is freed from being fixed to one spot and can instead be wherever the teacher or child wants in the classroom. No wires!
The other issue is that Smart are now charging for their Notebook software via a subscription model. It used to be that the software was free because everyone was buying the interactive boards. But I suspect that schools aren’t buying or replacing boards very often (for example, we have some very old boards at our school), but are continuing to use the free software. So Smart needs to make some money somewhere…
So we are left at a crossroads: do we pay (potentially) lots of money to keep using the Notebook software on interactive boards that increasingly don’t work? Or do we move away from a technology in its autumn and instead embrace the one that it’s still in its springtime. It’ll probably be as popular as Apple’s position on Flash on the iPad, but I do think it’s the right thing to do.
One of the really cool things about an iPad in the classroom is how you can mirror your iPad’s screen to any AirPlay-receiving device. Like an Apple TV. I use this functionality all of the time, basically using my iPad as a replacement for the notorious ‘smart’ board, particularly when using Explain Everything. It’s very handy and means I can have my iPad sitting on the piano whilst I’m teaching and easily change slides, annotate things, move things around etc.
Apple TV is Apple’s preferred way of doing this, which is their little black box of goodness which you then plug into your widescreen TV by HDMI and go from there. If you have a widescreen HDMI TV, then this is the simplest solution. However, most schools are instead running some sort of fangled VGA projector+computer+monitor+speakers+amp, without an HDMI input or output in sight and projecting onto a 4:3 interactive whiteboard.
This results in the following problems:
Enter Reflector (formerly Reflection). It’s a Mac (and PC) app that turns your computer into an AirPlay receiver. It’s only $15 and you can buy multiple licences slightly cheaper. All you have to do is start the app running, and then you can mirror your iPad to your Mac’s display.
The advantages are as follows:
The only downside is that iPad Keynote slideshows don’t fill the screen. This is because the Keynote app assumes it’s mirroring to a 16:9 Apple TV so adds it’s own black bars to the left and right of the image. Swings and roundabouts I guess!
Primary ICT 