Of all of the projects we have yet worked on this semester, this was the most frustrating one by far. I found that ActivInspire was not an intuitive or user-friendly program. Simple tasks like creating a table became time-consuming ventures, and I found that the "payoff" of what I created didn't feel like it was worth the time it took to create it. This felt especially true because I knew that I could create similar, equally useful products using programs like PowerPoint in a fraction of the time and that those products could also be utilized via the interactive white board system. I think our class and project time may have been better used to learn about many of those functions that we'll use more often (e.g., pulling up a Word document and writing/highlighting over it or pulling up a PowerPoint or Prezi) than on creating flipcharts.
2) How will you use this tool in your professional practice and/or instruction with students?
Because interactive white boards are slowly but surely replacing regular boards, it is imperative that I become familiar with how to use this technology well. Interactive white boards provide a great number of new opportunities for student involvement and interaction, but their use may be more limited in my own classroom because I will be teaching at the high school level. I hope to use this technology to engage students in ways that might not otherwise be possible, such as through the use of mutii-user activities like answering questions via clickers or playing a Jeopardy-style game to review content.
3) What will you do differently next time?
I would come prepared with the exact content I wanted to input into the flipchart, and I would have allowed myself more time to simply play around with the different features and become more comfortable with them. This would make the process go more quickly, instead of learning the program's capabilities at the same time as I was creating and editing the content.
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