Teachers Love SMART Boards

SMART Boards and WatchKnow Video Library

In all my workshops, I find that I never miss an opportunity to recommend the WatchKnow website for finding educational videos for the classroom. This is also a great place to locate videos that you may want to download and incorporate into a Notebook lesson file.

This site is maintained by the users and organized in a way that can really help teachers find relevant videos for the classroom. I also like the rating system that is used to help teachers make a educated decision on what videos to review.

You'll want to start searching through the site right away once you see it so please go there right now and take a look. When you're done, make sure you look at all the things you can do with WatchKnow by watching their introductory video.

Here is the video if you want more information now:

If you can't view the video here, you may have YouTube blocked. Click Here to go directly to the YouTube video.

Please don't forget to share this incredible resource with the teachers at your school.

Sharing Is Caring!

SMARTBoards and the Gettysburg Address Notebook Resource

Yesterday I went off on a tangent - something that happens often - and I ended up developing a Notebook 10 Smartboard resource for the Gettysburg Address. 

You're welcome to download and use the application in your classroom or you can  share it with other teachers.

 Page 1 - Introduction about why Abraham Lincoln addressed the crowd at Gettysburg.

 Page 2 - Video that highlights the parts of the Gettysburg Address while it is being read.

 Page 3 - Text sorting activity. Students try to put the Gettysburg Address into the correct order.

 Page 4 - Audio sorting activity. Students listen to segments of the Address and then try to put the audio blocks into the correct order.

You can download the notebook file here.

Sharing is Caring!

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. 

Sharing is Caring!

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!

Sharing is Caring!

SMARTBoards and Another Thanksgiving Word Search Riddle

 

Do you know the name of the Indian Tribe that celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims back in 1621?

You can find the answer in my latest U.S. Thanksgiving Holiday word search riddle created in Notebook version 10.

I created this word search riddle to be used as an introductory or follow-up activity for The First Thanksgiving website from Scholastic.com.

You can find additional U.S. Thanksgiving resources for your SMART Board on the SMARTBoard and U.S. Thanksgiving Holiday Resource Page.

If you know of any other U.S. Thanksgiving resources that work great on the SMARTBoard, please send them to me so I can share them with others.

Sharing is Caring!

SMART Boards and Clipmarks - Wow!

I'm having a lot of fun with a great new Web 2.0 tool called Clipmarks that allows you to share information from other websites quickly and easily.

In this example, I used Clipmarks to save specific information from two websites and then I packaged that information into a viewing window to share with you here on my blog.

The first clip is from the Clipmarks website. The second clip comes from a blog called Daily Finds. These two clips demonstrate how I can choose just the information I want to share from any website and share them with other people. In the second clip, I selected just the information I needed from the Daily Finds blog that discussed a fun web-based game called "Time Lord" which is a wonderful game to play on your SMART Board interactive whiteboard.

One of the reasons I like this application is that it makes it easy to give credit (and direct access) to information found on other websites. The other great thing about Clipmarks is that you can organize clips into folders and share them in many different ways. You can also have Ciipmarks update your Del.icio.us account if you have one. 

You'll need to install a browser tool but installation is quick and easy (at least it was using Firefox).

Have fun with this one!

Sharing is Caring!