Creating a Morning Calendar for Interactive Whiteboard Use

Towards the end of last school year we had Interactive Whiteboards (IWB) installed in the elementary classrooms in our district. The specific brand we obtained is the EPSON Brightlink.  I love it because it uses the preexisting white board surface I your classroom, so you can still write on your board with good old fashion dry erase markers when you want.  I wanted to modernize my morning calendar procedures to incorporate this IWB this year.  Last year I used a bulletin board as shown below.  By taking these procedures to IWB I hope to make this process more participatory for the students. 

In order to create this presentation, I learned several new skills today that help bring my PowerPoints up to the next level!   

This first was using the DragandDrop Macro so that my students will be able to manipulate objects by clicking on them, dragging them to a new location on the screen, and clicking again to drop them.  This DragandDrop macro was created by Hans W. Hofmann and Ute Simon. 

Much thanks to this blog article by Joe Dale that explained how to do this!  He adapted a PowerPoint created by Jo Rhys-Jones.  You can download this PowerPoint template from Joe Dale’s blog, and edit the slides to make your own content.  This really simplifies things, because the macro is already included in the PowerPoint.  You just have to make sure you have macros enabled in PowerPoint.  Joe Dale has fantastic directions on how to do this, so you must really check it out!  

The second skill I learned today was how to embed videos directly into PowerPoint slides.

I found this video very helpful in learning how to do this.   

Here is a video that shows how I used these two skills to make a presentation for my morning calendar procedures.  Please let me know if you have any questions.  

A special thanks to Harry Kindergarten for making fantastic educational songs for children.  

Another special thanks to http://www.teacherfiles.com/ that provides free educational clipart, where I obtained my math clipart!  

Click here to download this presentation.  Make sure you enable macros when you receive the security message or it won't work!