Cleverboard

For some years now, we have had cleverboards in every classroom at my school. The idea is that the teachers should be able to produce simple but fun documents on the cleverboard, which they can use when they teach their pupils in various subjects at school. Once the teachers have made such document or a simple program, they can easily save them to a shared server so that other teachers can take advantage of the programs. Even though the technology has been in the classroom for several years, the programs and documents created in our school are still quite limited. This is due to the fact that other more traditional tasks have had higher priority. Therefore the teachers haven´t had enough time to create new documents and programs. Instead, our great cleverboards have become rather expensive film projectors. But I think it is time for a change.

I recently made ​​two fairly simple programs /documents that I have used when I was teaching my nine year old pupils in English. The first program is some sort of a quiz, containing 10 pictures of various fruits, in which the pupils have to choose the correct answer (1X2) that answers the question of what the fruit is called in English. For every answer I have attached a sound loop that reveal whether the pupils have answered right or wrong on the questions. You can use this program several times and it is easy to change themes. You just have to swap the pictures, the questions and the answers so they fit another theme. The pupils can for example practice the English words for various animals, furniture, cartoon characters and more.

The other program that I have made includes different cards where I have written Swedish words on one side and their English counterparts on the other side. The pupils then have to read words such as "bil" in Swedish and then they have to say what that word is called in English before they turn the card over. The pupils have to check themselves if they were right or wrong. Even this program can be used multiple times in the classroom and it is easy to replace the words if the teacher wants the pupils to practice other words.

The disadvantage with this kind of program is that it only provides summative assessments of the pupils. And that is a pity because I am trying real hard to increase all the situations where I do formative assessments in the classroom. But it is probably not entirely wrong to mix these two methods of assessment in teaching either. Moderation is often best.

Marcus Sandberg, 1EN06U