Thanks Leon

Thanks Leon for leading us to the Snartboardforum, you were a perfect guide ("akelea"). The picture says enough!

The final tour

Wednesday, the last day of this great and educational trip. After disembarking and losing some participants, we went to Patrick's school by bus.

At the cruise terminal Laura wanted to get everybody together to see if everybody was present. But somehow our overactive tour guide had some other plans. a group photo. Guess who won?

so here is the group Photo.

At the school we could see how they use SMARTBoards. There was even one at the library. students gave us a schooltour. It wasn't what you would name a normal school. the school was devided in units and the classes consist of about 15 students. It was like a dream come true, only 15 children per classroom.

Part of the tour was attending a class, so we could see how the teachers used the boards in their class. But for us to understand the lessons, they had to be in english and that's not the language an average student is formiliour enough with to answer comlicated questions from the teachers. So every once in a while the language changed to swedish. The class I attended was a lesson about diktators, democracy and anarchy. thanks to youtube and writing over youtube the teacher had an "easy" job in explaining the differences between the three systems. So never block youtube from your school network when working with SMART!

After lucnh, provided by the school cafetaria everybody said goodbye and went home/to the airport. most people went to the airport, so there was a small reunion at Arlanda.

At Arlanda the dutch participants decided that in august we should come together again. but than with some collegues to show what everybody tought their collegues, and at what level they are then.

I think I speak for everybody if I say that we all learnt a lot from this trip. Theachers as well as SMART Tech.

I would love it if the participants could give some quotes in which they summarize the SMARTBoard Sweden User Forum.

Many thanks to the organisation and kind regards to everybody.

Back in the boat

After the discussion everybody split up into groups of 3 to make 5 page (approximate) lessons.

These are pictures of work in progress.

Preparing lessons is fun again due to SMART Notebook.

And these are some pictures of the results. Due to lack of time the organisation thought that everybody could give their work to Yolanda so we could pick the best and the runner up. (there were some prices to be won). But the developpers really wanted to see all the results so they could choose the best themselves. This ment that we could only have dinner at about nine. At home (in the netherlands) I'm used to having dinner at six, so nine o'clock is very very very late.

But the results were worth the waiting. A lot of activity toolkit and internet pictures and internetlinks. More frequent than the first best practices we saw at the beginning of the boat trip.

Boats from the essentials for educators Balloon pops from the activity toolkit
self adjustable dices from the activity toolkit.
Pictures from smart people, from left to right. Terry, Yolanda, Sap (I don't dare to type his full name), Me, Alexandra (not laughing!?!?!?!), Tobias and Laura.
5 of them actually work at SMART Tech. two of them just are.....

And here are the winners, they named themselves "just kiddin' "

(here's a proud distributor, Audrey was one of the winners)

The runners up each won an Airliner, so how to top that?

In the evening, dinner and dancing.

This guy had his birthday 84 I think, but he doens't look a day older than 38. It's Jürgen from Netsmart.

Tobi and Terry, teambuilding at the karaoke bar
and some dancing.

To top the winning of an airliner as a runner up. The winners each won a Senteo Interactive Respons System set!!!!!!! (with 32 clickers)

We suggested that the winners could give the clickers back so they didn't have to pay taxes at customs. But they took the change of importing the sets to their own country. Which wasn't so easy as it seems. a new complete Senteo set also has a screwdriver and 64 batteries. Explain thát at customs when you're taking the set as handluggage.

arriving at Helsinki

After breakfast Yolanda showed us the lesson activity toolkit and let us play with it for a while. It was like a group of children got a new toy. Look at Jelle and Hans work.

Then finally there was time for some relaxation. We went on a bustour in Helsinki (just for one hour and a lunch, then it was back to work again. The most remarkable sight was a church which wasn't conventionally built, but carved out a rocky hill. very imposant when you look at it from the inside. Here you see the inside of the church.

But again it wasn't all fun, we had to discuss about the implementation of SMARTBoards in School, with the following topics.

- How do you "win over" colleagues reluctant to technology in the class?

- Creativity versus curricullum.

- Creating and maintaining usergroups.

The result was a large discussion about these toppics when we came back on the boat again. In SMARTIdeas finally a Conceptmap was created (by Tobias and his assistant Alexandra) with all the oppinions of the participants.

Third part of day two

Tobi forced me to place his pictures on the blog about the evening (and myself)

First a photo of me at work (on this blog)

And yet another best practise. This teacher has developped some templates of TV game shows and she plays those games with here students, to get them going....
She promised that the templates will be available for us.

Imagine what happens if you put 7 SMARTBoard addicts in a cramped space.

...... they talk about SMARTBoards!

Imagine what happens if you fill a dinnerroom with 40 SMARTBoard addicts.....

They talk about SMARTBoards!

A lot!

second part of day two

I said that I was going to write some more on the weblog yesterday, but at open see there was no internet. so now I'm taking you to the second part of the (intensive) user forum day.

Here are some pictures I took from the best practices (where I left of).

First "our" Audrey, explaining the way she use powerpoint to "simplify" the texts from the textbook. Her students have problems reading the long texts so the summary's are very important for her students. she doesn't make use of fancy object animations because that would distract her students.

Audrey: "In my school I work more with the SMARTBoard than most of my collegues, but now at the userforum I see that I'm only using a smal part of the possibilities. I've learnt more in one day than I ever did!"

For My belgian collegues: here is Sabine showing her lesson about dangers and safety around the house.
I'm sorry for the darkness of the fotograph, but it's really her.

Here you see Jelle pay attention to his dutch collegue.
after everybody got back together again, the "top" best practices were shown to the entire group. I'm proud to say that Deborah was one of them. She amazed everybody with the use of flash animations she downloaded from the internet.

I would like to say something about the dinner and the drink after the intensive hours in the conference rooms. But I have to censor myself. Let's say we had a good time and the next day we were all tired because of the hour we lost due to the changing timezone (This "boatleg" is much worse than a jetleg)

Day two of the User forum

Today the work really started, but first Breakfast. Here you see Hans de Ruijter having breakfast with the german and the finish SMART distributors .

After everybody got to know eachother better, the first presentation started on the Boat we're sailing on, the "Silja Symphony".

As you can see in the agenda Laura James (SMART Technologies) Area manager for north and western Europe) started with a NB10 demonstration and a product overview of SMARTBoard products with an explanation of how to make a classroom really interactive, using the SMARTBoard, a Sympodium, Senteo and the new SMART document camera. For most participants Senteo and the document camera were new products and everybody was very enthousiastic about them.

After this presentation Yolanda (SMART content developper) presented the new features in NB10. e.g. Magic pen, filler tool, Lesson activity Tookit and tables. Everything Yolanda presented the participants (all with laptops and NB10) wanted to try the functions directly, this led to some communcationproblems. Yolanda went on to the next item while everybody else was trying the last feature.

After Lunch Saptashiru Basu (SMART Sneteo product manager) did a Senteo Interactive respons system demonstration. Everybody got a clicker and had to answer questions Sap asked directly. like: "is this a nice boat?" most people asnwered "Yes!" From this moment on Sap was a popular man under the participants.

And now the reason why everybody joined the User forum, exchanging best practices. The group was devided into 3 smaller groups. We as distributors were convinced that some people should be cloned for SMARTBoard use. There were proper "Linda's" (my hyperactive VSV demonstration machine collegue) between them.

Here's one. documents were uploaded onto a website from which the documents were downloaded directly (where heve we seen that before)

Here you see Audrey listen and Boris at work.



later today more.

Day one: our arrival in stockholm

Today at 5.30 we met at the schiphol plaza for the first time to go on our trip to stockholm for the SMARTBoard userforum sweden.

At 6.55 hour we left (should leave) schiphol airport. Because of some passengers who didn't show we left a bit later. After two hours we arrived at stockholmArlanda airport.

From there we took the train to stockholm central station with a train velocity of 180-190 km/h.

when arriving in stockholm central station we went to the metro (TunnelBana) to go to our hotel. (if we couldn't find the metro station after directions from a train employee we could come back and punch him in the face, but that wasn't nescessery).

Too bad we took the wrong exit of the metrostation, therefore the walk of 6 minutes to the hotel took at least half an hour, we were almost in finland.

When leaving the luggage behind at the hotel reception we went for the centre of stockholm were we would meet our lovely hostess of the day Alexandra from the organising SMART distributor, and her husband. we walked through the old town where we say the government building; the smallest street in stockholm and changing of the royal guards.

and took a two hour boat tour (some of us took a two hour powernap).

At this moment we are at the point of going to the hotel bar for an informal drink. So even we are working on a sunday, our jobs aren't too bad. we'll have to wait what tomorrow brings us. Three days of hard labour on a rocking boat all the way to finland.

En dit is Boris ... ;-)