Teachers Love SMART Boards

SMARTBoards and Magnetic Poetry for Kids

It's hard to keep up with all the people talking about The Magnetic Poetry for Kids website. I just spent 40 minutes playing with the various "kits" and now my brain won't shut off thinking about how many ways this site can be used inside the classroom.

First of all, this is a very simple  concept. The site has a work area on the left side of the screen and a collection of words and/or phrases on the right-hand side. To use the program, students simply touch and drag the words into the work area. Words can be moved around with ease and placed anywhere the student or teacher desires.

Teachers could easily prepare the work area to contain words for the students to use to build sentences or they could allow students to explore the word collection and choose their own. This may help teachers to differentiate the learning process and control the difficulty of the task.

"Make a sentence that contains one noun, one verb, and one adjective."
"Build a 10 word sentence from the group of words in the word collection."
"Find all the nouns in the top part of the refrigerator.
"Find the verbs that describe what you can do on a rainy day."

The kids area contains four different kits that contain different word collections including a "First Words" kit and a "Story Maker" kit.

This site works extremely well with the SMART Board. You can also increase the zoom level of your browser to make sure the application fills the entire screen!

Please share this with the other teachers in your school! It's a real winner!

(Once again, a big thanks to Danny Nicholson and everyone else who has mentioned this site for getting the word out! )

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The Essay

Watch video directly on YouTube

SMART Boards and the Growth of a Nation

I really enjoyed the Growth of a Nation activity from the Animated Atlas website. The presentation takes you through the growth of the United States from 1780 all the way through to the current day.

The website is fully interactive and works great on the Smartboard; it allows you to pause and restart the presentation; it allows you to slide the time line pointer to advance to different time periods, it allows you to click on the states to see more detail; and it even provides a scrollable time line that organizes pertinent data into key topics.

The presentation would make a good starter activity for teachers, and student can use the site as an engaging resource for United States History. In addition, teachers could use the Smart Screen Capture utility to capture various time periods and use the images inside Smart Notebook.

It may be fun to capture images from different time periods and then have students guess what period the image represents. Or, you could build a puzzle of different time periods and then have the students guess what time period the puzzle represents.

Here's a Notebook file containing a puzzle for the period 1840 - 1860. I used the  techniques from my course Notebook Applications - Create a Puzzle to integrate this into Notebook.

The site also has an accompanying video on YouTube which show the expansion of the United States in under one minute. 

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SMARTBoards and Sketch & Paint Online

 
It's definitely an exciting time to be exploring the Internet and experimenting with all the wonderful Web 2.0 applications. These applications do not require you to download any software and they work just like a program installed on your computer's hard drive.

I actually do not like to recommend sites that require you to install any software onto your computer unless an online application does not exist yet. Users, especially Windows users, take some risk when downloading and installing software applications from unknown sources over the Internet.

One group of Web 2.0 applications that are a lot of fun to use are paint applications. These applications allow you to draw, sketch, and paint using various paint tools. Most of these work great on the SMART Board interactive whiteboard but not all of them allow you to save your work to your computer's hard drive. 

The program I've been using lately is Sketch & Paint written by Tom Eriksson and available from his site called OneMotion.com. (Tom has a lot of other really cool stuff on his site so definitely check it out!)

Tom has managed to create a very intuitive method of selecting colors, tools, and tool options that make it very easy for students (and teachers) to use the application. Best of all, you can save your work to your hard drive as a JPG image and you can even open JPG images from your computer and edit them using his application.

Teachers, why not spice up some of your Notebook lessons by creating some simple backgrounds and/or sketches using an application like Sketch & Paint.

My very first creation was a video frame template that is used in Notebook to surround videos. You're more than welcome to download this image here but I highly recommend that you have some fun and create your own!

I want to send a special thank you to Danny Nicholson for sharing this application on his site The Whiteboard Blog! Keep up the great work Danny!

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SMARTBoards and See Ya Later at ABCya!

I've seen a lot of people recommending the site ABCya over the past couple of weeks (the latest being Brenda M. over at Diigo) so I thought I would check it out and see if it was a good resource for the SMART Board interactive whiteboard.

 My conclusion is that it is not just a good resource, it's a great resource! The site has interactive activities for Kindergarten through 5th Grade (ages 5 - 11) covering all basic subject areas.

Here's the description of the site as found on their home page:

ABCya! is a leader in free & exciting computer activities for elementary students to learn on the web. All educational computer games and activities were created or approved by certified teachers! Activities are modeled from primary grade lessons and enhanced to provide an interactive way to learn. The activities incorporate content areas such as math and reading while introducing basic computer skills. Many of the kindergarten and first grade games are equipped with sound to enhance understanding. You can also find great elementary holiday activities here!

The site is free but has advertisements surrounding the activities. However, it was very easy to use my browser's zoom feature to have the activities fill up the page while hiding the advertisements. This is a key requirement when I recommend websites that contain advertisements.

Remember to share this site with the other teachers in your school!

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SMARTBoards and the Crickweb Flash Resources

I was searching through my past blog posts and I'm quite surprised that I have not written a post about the amazing flash-based resources found on Crickweb. This site contains hundreds of quality interactive resources for children aged 4 to 11.

For my U.S. readers, the activities are organized into three age groups: The Early  Years (age 4 to 5), Key Stage 1 (age 6 to 7), and Key Stage 2 (age 8 to 11). Within  each age group the activities are organized by subject area.

The basic subject areas include Math, Science, History, and Literacy. However, there are also activites for Geography, Religion Education, French, Spanish, and even Design & Technology. (Please note that since this site is from the UK, the money activities use British Currency. However, teachers from other areas should still explore these activities.) 

The resources contained on this site are all interactive and very few of them require keyboard input. Best of all, all of the activities work great on the SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard since most of the activities only  require students to touch or drag objects. (If you would like to download and use the Promethean Flipchart files that are available, you can import these using Notebook. Just open Notebook, select "import" from the file menu, change the file type to "All Promethean Files.") 

I've included a few screen shots but the best way to find what your looking for is to browse around and play with the activities. I can promise you that you'll find something fun and exciting for your classroom!

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SMART Boards and Custom Resources for Algebra Two

Recently, someone shared a link (thanks Amy!) to some great Algebra Two (Holt, Rinehart &  Winston) resources created by a teacher named Thomas Vizza. This site presents a wonderful example of how to start moving toward a "student-centered" learning environment where a teacher's primary focus is on creating the resources and environments that help students learn more effectively.

Mr. Vizza has created a collection of Smart Notebook files to support various  chapters of the Algebra Two text book. In addition, he's made available an amazing library of Mathematical Notebook Galleries containing images, pages, and even a few flash animations! My favorite one is definitely the Formula Gallery. The image on the right is displaying the Quadratic Equations folder in the Algebra section of this Gallery. Notice how well organized this is and how well he labeled all the objects!

Also, if you're a teacher looking for an example of what to do when you can't make it to class, then check out his lesson plan for Graphing Quadratics he left for the substitute teacher. Totally awesome!

Mr. Vizza's website contains much more than I'm describing here. Even if you're not a Math teacher, I highly recommend browsing around the website to help get some ideas of how you can set up your own class resource center. Building this type of resource library not only helps students learn it also helps teachers facilitate learning more effectively.

Oh, I almost forget, Mr. Vizza also has a collection of other websites that he recommends. I'll also go ahead and put a few of my favorite links here so they're handy:

Jim Reed's Math Site

Algebasics

While I'm at it, here's another Notebook Gallery (shared by my friend Obe Hostetter) containing 60 Mathematical symbols. It's definitely a must have.

Please share this post with your High School Mathematics teachers!

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SMARTBoards and Phun with Phonics

Sadlier-Oxford Publishing does a great job producing interactive activities in all key  subject areas that work great on your Smart Board Interactive Whiteboard.

I especially like the Student Center - Games and Activities page in their section on Phonics. They have some great interactive games for grades 1 through 6 (6 years through 12 years old).

The games work great on the SMART Board however a few of the games require keyboard input. The feedback provided for the students is very good and all of the activities can be zoomed to fill the screen.

My favorite game is the Analogy Challenge which is located in the Grades 5-6 section. 

By the way, feel free to explore this wonderful site for interactive activities in other subject areas. It's really an outstanding resource for teachers!

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SMARTBoards and Painting Your Way to Success

I was playing around with the ArtPad from art.com and I find it a totally engaging experience. I love watching the playback of how someone else draws or paints. This site does a really good job allowing you to control playback of your own design or a design already contained in the gallery. The site is so simple to use and it works great on the Smart Board.

This site has obvious uses in an art class but can also add a lot of engagement to an otherwise stagnant lesson.

For example, teachers or students could solve math problems and then decorate the solution for a little artistic touch.

Teachers could have a review lesson called "Painting Your Way to Success" where students get to come to the SMART Board and solve a Math problem. If they solve the problem correctly, they get to spend time decorating it and signing it as long as they don't cover the answer. Teachers could then post the links to the finished art work for students and parents to review. How excited do you think students would be if their Math art work was featured on the Internet and shared by the teacher?!! If you click on the picture above, you can see it being created in artPad. You may want to adjust the speed of the playback.

Please share your ideas for using this site in the classroom!

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