Turn your tablet or Chromebook into an interactive whiteboard

Turn your tablet or Chromebook into an interactive whiteboard

Many teachers create lessons for their students with their SMART Boards. Some even record these lessons so that students can review them at their own pace. Here are some alternative tools that you can use with a tablet or Chromebook to pull together sketches, pictures, video and audio to create a stellar lesson. Both of these have similar features to the SMART Notebook software, but with the added benefit of being more portable on tablets.

Lensoo Create
Chromebook, Android, iOS

"Lensoo Create turns your iPad or Android tablet into a virtual whiteboard with voice recording and smooth digital writing. Using Lensoo Create you can quickly share your ideas through email, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn from virtually anywhere. Whether you are a teacher looking to instill knowledge, a student wishing to present your ideas or simply a person with an impressive skill to share, Lensoo Create is for you."

They also have a collection of recordings made by other people that is sorted by subject and is available on their website or within the apps. A big benefit to this tool is that it is available for Chromebooks in the Chrome Web Store so students and teachers can use it on the approximately 3400 Chromebooks in circulation within our district.

Explain Everything
Android, iOS

Explain Everything is a unique interactive whiteboard and screencasting tool used by over a million students and educators. Teachers can use this tool to create engaging presentations with many elements. Students can also use this tool to creatively demonstrate understanding. This app is a paid app and will cost you $2.99 on either platform.

"Create slides, draw in any color, add shapes, add text, and use a laser pointer. Rotate, move, scale, copy, paste, clone, and lock any object added to the stage.

Add photos, videos, shapes, import PDF documents from local storage, Google Drive, Dropbox or insert a fully functioning web browser window. Export MP4 movies, YouTube videos or save Explain Everything projects locally, to Google Drive and to Dropbox.

No account is necessary to use Explain Everything and share creations."

IFTTT, Community Ed Schoology Page, Schoology Notification Settings (May 13, 2014)

Tip #1: If This Then That

If This Then That is a service that allows you to make connections between many of your online services. You create recipes that trigger an action in one service when something happens with another service. An example that I used in class was every time the daily weather for White Bear Lake was posted on the Weather Channel, IFTTT would add  that weather data to a new row in one of my Google spreadsheets. My students then compared the weather data that they were collecting for class with the data that was automatically added to the spreadsheet from the Weather Channel.  Essentially it is a way to automate some of the tasks that you do already, freeing up some of your time. It also has features that can do some pretty cool and unique things.  For a more detailed description click here.

IFTTT is also an app for Android and Apple.

Tip #2: Stay in the loop: Community Ed Teacher Page

You may have seen the new "White Bear Lake Teachers" page in your list of courses in Schoology. This page was created by the folks in Community Education to keep you in the loop about professional development opportunities.

"This will be where we post all flyers from Colleges and Universities offering professional development for teachers. We are moving away from paper flyers being placed in mailboxes and moving toward an online posting of flyers. We decided Schoology is the way to go to forward this communication to teachers."

-Kristine Wehrkamp

Tip #3: Notifications or not. The choice is yours.

As you are being enrolled in various courses and creating your own, you may or may not want to get an email about everything that happens in the course. Luckily, the choice is up to you! This is how you change notifications for a specific course and here is reminder on how to change notification settings for your account.