Promethean Training Session - Post 3

A couple of small but useful tips:

You can change the flipchart style from Activstudio to Windows - this is particularly useful when you are in design mode. It gives dropdown menus at the top and works more like Windows.
From the main menu on the toolbar
>customise
>flipchart style
>choose between standard activstudio and standard windows

If you are using Powerpoint, there are some useful tools (not connected with activstudio) at the bottom left corner of the screen:

• left and right page turn icons
• menu for pens, highlighter, eraser etc so you can annotate over a slide
• menu for blanking out the screen (similar to mute but choose black or white screen!), going to another page etc

David

Promethean Training Session Post 2 - MS Word and WB

To use word documents in WB:

• From main menu > Studio Settings


• Click on 'Linked File Hosting'


• Tick the boxes for Word, Powerpoint and Excel and click OK

NB - these settings will need to be redone for each PC that you log on to

Now you can drag files from these 3 programs into a flipchart, open them in a separate window and copy chunks of text from a document onto the flipchart.

How?

• open a flipchart and click on the resources icon on the toolstrip


• click on the folder icon ('Other Resource Folder')


• and then the icon with 3 dots ('Browse to another folder')


• use the folder/file tree to find the document or file that you want to work with


• when you click OK, it transfers the file(s) to the Other Resources column


• drag and drop the file onto the flipchart, where it will show as a Word icon


• double click the icon to open the file in a small window over the flipchart

[Alternative way: open Windows Explorer (Start+E) and simply drag the file from My Documents onto the flipchart. Choose 'Add links to files as>>Image Icon Objects'.]

From there, you can arrange/resize the window to show the text on the upper half of the WB and leave the lower half free to write on.

Also, it is very easy to highlight/select part of the text (or an image) from the file or document and drag it onto the flipchart to annotate/edit.

David

Promethean training session

I thought last Friday's training session was very successful. The room was full, people stayed longer than I expected for a Friday afternoon,and the content was just what we needed - lots of positive feedback this week too. I think the mix of watching Rachel demonstrating, then going off to try it out worked well and I know people have started to use some of the techniques in class already.

It seems like a good idea to post my impressions on the session, for 2 reasons:

• to give those who coudn't make it a flavour of what we covered


• to invite others to post/comment on what I've said, either to add details that I've missed or to tell us how it's worked for them in class.

I'm going to add posts for each separate topic so that it doesn't get too unwieldy and also to make it easier for others to comment.

Please feel free to add comments or posts to this blog.

David