Before we dive into teaching with your ActivBoard lets take care of a few housekeeping items. First and foremost, remember that your Activboard is just a large display of the device you have plugged into it, whether that be a laptop or desktop. What does that mean? Anything you do on your computer you can also do on the ActivBoard because it is just mirroring the image. Depending on which version of an ActivBoard you have you can also use your pen and/or fingers to make your content interactive.

ActivInspire software and ActivDriver

Much of what you will do will run through the ActivInspire software and ActivDriver. It is important to make sure those are updated.

Donwloading Drivers

If you visit support.prometheanworld.com and click downloads you can find the ActivInspire software and the ActivDriver download for your corresponding hardware. The ActivDriver is super important to making sure the touch between your computer and the board work. If you have any issues downloading or updating either of those, reach out to your school admin or technology department contact. It may require a particular password set up by the district to allow any type of update or new software to be added to your computer.

Teaching with ActivBoard

Ok, house keeping out of the way. Let’s get to teaching! I have my resources saved to my cloud storage and I am ready to host a synchronous lesson or record for the purposes of an asynchronous lesson. I am going to use my web browser to visit the hosting site for my district’s web conferencing platform. In this particular instance I am going to use Blackboard collaborate but you could also do this with zoom, google meet, or any platform like that. I am going to start the session (walk through that process) and then I am going to share my screen. Now that my screen is shared I am going to open up ActivInspire and the PDF reading for our Forms of Government Lesson. I am going to use the desktop annotate feature in Activinspire to make notes while we read through this information. If I decide I want to continue the conversations and need some more note taking space I can turn off the desktop annotate feature and go fully into the ActivInspire whiteboard space and use all the tools in my toolbar to take notes. I can even utilize pre-built templates in the resource browser. So if I want to compare and contrast a dictatorship and a monarchy with my students I could easily import a venn diagram to organize those ideas. When I am done I can save this flipchart as a PDF and upload it to my school’s LMS like blackboard, google classroom ,etc.

While we just showed you a quick snippet of using lesson materials the ideas are endless. I especially love that I can teach with the same tools I am comfortable with and am no longer trying to write with my mouse or show myself using an expo board in the background or any of those creative alternatives we came up with when we didn’t have access to our classroom hardware! So before you keep journeying through these videos. Take a second to try this idea out! If you have any questions give us a shout in the message thread or chat feature.