Getting Big Books On The Big Screen

We are exploring Shape Poems in class, and I wanted to place a few example that we could share into a Smartbook.

In the past I have scanned images showing similar texts that I want to share, dragging the resulting images into a smartbook to be worked on or annotated. This can be incredibly time consuming but the results are usually spectacular, even though the file sizes can be large. But how to get Big Books onto the big screen thats a different matter. No one I suspect has an A1 scanner. However many of us do have digital cameras.

heres a quick how to

• Place the Big Book on a table, or the floor.
• Frame the page you want to use in your viewfinder
• Snap away. ( you might want to find a space with lots of light and turn off the flash!)

I have a card reader, so taking the memory card out of my camera the PC treats this like a flash drive. Using this tool the image folder on the camera's memory card can be opened like any other on the computer then opening the Smart Notebook, the photograph of the page can be dragged from the card directly into the smartbook.

The whole process of including four pages from a big book took about 5 minutes this morning, and created an instant resource I could share with my students. Locking the images to page, we highlighted nouns and adjectives in situ, discussed and added new openers for the poem, brainstormed and collected alternative WOW words we might use to replace some text elements, before going off in small groups to innovate on the starting point.

Another useful application for this process is in creating stories to share for assembly, instead of using smartbook or powerpoint another old chestnut however you might want to try the slideshow tool in Windows Picture and Fax viewer.

Here take photographs, or scan the pages you want to use as before, but inorder to force the slideshow tool to play the pages in order, rename them. I often use the alphabet, eg page 1 is "a.jpg," 2 is "b.jpg," or use 3 digit numbers beginning with for example 001.jpg, 002.jpg and so on. Place all the images in one folder on your PC or Laptop, as this will also speed up loading on screen.

When you are ready to use the story, open the folder with your images in and right click on "a.jpg," or "001.jpg," and then select open with from the menu, followed by Windows picture and Fax viewer. When the software opens, press the slideshow icon. With slideshow open you can control the turning of pages with the play and pause button. This could also be used in literacy hour on the SmartBoard, by using pens to annotate texts, and then using the screen capture tools to transfer your annotated pages to a smartbook for later use.