Teachers Love SMART Boards

SMARTBoards and Learn Your Tables

This wonderful resource has been making it's way through my Twitter PLN and I thought I should share it here as well since my 9 year old daughter gave it the thumbs up over the weekend.

Learn Your Tables is a flash-based resource that helps students learn their multiplication facts. It provides three types of resources: Drag and Drop, Enter the Answer, and Assessment. You can even select a specific table or you can mix it up and have it provide facts from the 1s through 10s table.

When using the Enter the Answer resource, they provide a keypad so kids can touch the correct answer on the SMART Board - no keyboard required. In addition, the mixed tables Enter the Answer review will provide a quick feedback for each table while you're going through the activity.

Firefox users, you can use the Flash Game Maximizer add-on to make any flash activity full screen. I highly recommend this add-on when using flash-based activities inside the classroom.

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SMARTBoards and e-Learning for Kids

One of my very first blog posts talked about the non-profit e-learning site called e-Learning for Kids. That was over two years ago! I'm happy to say that this amazing website is still around and is only getting better.

I didn't really say too much about this site on that initial blog post...I didn't need to. It doesn't take long to realize what an amazing resource this is for the SMART Board classroom. The site contains over 100 courses covering Math, Science, Computer Skills, Language Arts, and English.

In addition, the site contains over 50 courses in Health and Life Skills. The courses in this area range from understanding how the body works to understanding things like depression, bullying, and preventing diseases. It is by far the most comprehensive collection of activities for learning and understanding about the human condition. 

The age-level for the courses ranges from 4 to 12 years old and the design of almost all the courses was done with Interactive Whiteboards in mind. It is truly a pleasure to see such wonderful educational content on the Internet free of advertising.

Firefox users should look into using the Flash Game Maximizer add-on to help enlarge the flash activities so they fill your entire SMART Board.

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SMARTBoards and Downloadable Science Animations

While the content of interactive educational resources is growing on the Internet, very rarely do you find websites that allow you (and provide assistance) for downloading the content to your own computer.

Freezeray is a one of those few places where teachers can find and download interactive resources for Science investigations. In fact, these resources were developed specifically for Interactive Whiteboards.

The site organizes the resources into various categories including Physics, Biology, Technology, and Chemistry. They even have a fun place to practice  Science-related literacy. The resources here include a hangman type game and various key-idea interactive resources.

As I mentioned previously, the interactive resources are downloadable and can be used freely for non-commercial purposes. The really good thing about these resources is that they are flash-based and can be imported into your Smart Notebook files. 

While the site has instructions for downloading the resources by searching your Temporary Files folder, there is an easier way, especially if you have the Firefox web browser.

Here's a short video that shows how to save the flash-based (swf) version of these activities to your computer using the Firefox browser and import the file into Notebook. (This video is iPhone compatible.)

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