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 Mangahigh Math Games

Okay, I'm hooked. 

I'll freely admit that I've been playing Math games on the Mangahigh website for just over an hour now. The games are very engaging and they work great on the SMART Board. 

Mangahigh uses game-based learning to help students aged 10-16 learn basic Math skills. A lot of people do not think game-based learning is the best method for instructions. I agree but I also think it can be a highly effective method for supplementing the learning process and increasing motivation for some students. 

Let's check out just one of games called TransStar - Journey to the Core which helps students understand Geometric transformations by helping an alien travel through space using Stargates. The game goes through various levels (Sectors) and stages (Zones) using reflections, rotations, enlargements, and translations. It's really nice since you get three tries at each Zone and you get to see the result of your transformation. If you don't align the alien spaceship aligned with the Stargate after three tries, you will need to start over at the last Zone you completed. It's really quite fun.

 

In the image above, the student needs to avoid the orange arrows and use the rotation orbs to align the space craft in quadrant II to the Stargate in quadrant IV using a counter-clockwise rotation.

This site is a subscription-based service but you do not need to subscribe to play the games. You can actually register your school and do a lot on the site without paying. The pricing model is very expensive, especially if a teacher wants to sign up his/her entire class. 

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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 Mathsframe

When teachers ask me for interactive SMART Board activities for Mathematics, I always send them to Mathsframe. The activities found on Mathsframe are well designed, engaging, and extremely effective. When you use the activities, you can tell right away that they were designed by an actual teacher.

The wonderful people at Mathsframe are big believers in helping teachers and they provide an incredible library of free resources. They have over 10 activities and each activities has various options and levels to choose from depending on the level of the student.

They also provide schools with an extremely inexpensive site license for their Mathframe Block A - Counting, Partitioning and Calculating which is designed around the Primary Framework Mathematics Block A. The license does not require the Internet and it can be loaded on all the computers in your school. The license provides over 40 activities that cover learning objectives across Key Stage 2 (students aged 7 to 11). 

I just read this morning that they've made improvements to their complimentary interactive number line activity and they also added a bunch of new levels. 

If you're a Twitter user, you can follow Mathsframe to stay up-to-date on what's going on.

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SMARTBoards and Beginning of the Year Surveys

TeacherLED Interactive is definitely one of my favorite sites for interactive resources for the SMART Board. I thought it might be fun to use one of their resources called "Survey Talking" to do some beginning of the year surveys of your students and then have the results be displayed in a either a pie chart or bar graph.

"Conduct a class survey from your interactive whiteboard.  Demonstrate the use of tallies and frequency charts.  Immediately generate a pie chart and bar chart from your results and compare how useful they are in presenting data.  Random data can also be generated."

The "Survey Talking" resource is very easy to use and even has a very easy to follow 3-page instruction document. To begin using the activity, click on the Survey Talking link and then click on the "Go Learning Resources" link.

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SMARTBoards and Interactive Multiplication Tables

As my daughter enters the 3rd Grade (8 years old), she'll be working on memorizing her multiplication facts from 0 through 12. My experience as a Mathematics teacher is that memorizing multiplication facts, like it or not, makes life a lot easier in today's Mathematics classroom.

At home, I downloaded Timez Attack for her to practice her facts. She absolutely loves this game and has advanced way past my expectations. At school, I hope her teacher takes advantage of some of the outstanding interactive websites that are dedicated to helping kids learn, understand, and practice their multiplication facts.

Here's a good collection of interactive multiplication review activities for the classroom that work great on the SMART Board.

Multiplication Tables - Interactive Arithmetic Exercise

Helping with Math . com - Multiplication Games (main sites has ads but the activities are great with the SMART Board)

Illuminations: Times Table

Multiplication.com - The Ants Go Marching...

Multiplication.com - Practice the Times Tables

Multiplication Matho

Splat Square 1 - 100

Please share any other interactive multiplication applications that work great on a SMART Board.

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SMART Boards and Fun "Bitesize" Activities from the BBC

I've mentioned the Bitesize activities from the BBC before but wanted to focus specifically on the KS1 (Key Stage 1) activities for children aged 5 to 7.

The KS1 Bitesize area contains both Math and Literacy interactive activities. The Math section contains 12 different activities and the Literacy section has nine. Each activity has three levels of difficulty: Medium, Hard, and Really Hard.

The graphics and audio on these activities are very professional and all the activities were developed with interactive whiteboards in mind so they all work great with the SMART Board. Student feedback is also very stimulating. After students touch on an answer, the activity responds with some fun animation and let's them know if they are correct. In the Kung-Fu Sentences activity (picture below), the character does a spinning Kung-Fu move after students select an answer. If the student is correct, the Kung-Fu Master flips the correct answer into place with his stick. It's pretty cool! 

 
The great thing about these activities is that they can be viewed full-screen to help make the activities more engaging. In addition, each activity has a corresponding worksheet. 

Teachers can also access KS2 and KS3 activities from the site. 

Please share this wonderful resource with the other teachers in your school. You'll soon be the "go to" person for finding great resources for your SMART Board!

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SMART Boards and a Simple Number Line Tool

Sometimes the tools that are the most simple to use are also the most powerful. Case in point, the Decimal Number Lines Tool over at Maths Online is an extremely effective learning tool to use that is also very simple in design and function. It's a perfect companion for the SMART Board.

The Decimal Number Line tool allows teachers to display and interact with a number line. The number line can be moved around and zoomed bigger or smaller. Teachers can decide on which units are displayed and also whether unit marks are displayed. What's really cool is that teachers and students can move an arrow back and forth above the number and when they're ready, they can touch above the arrow to reveal the arrow's location on the number line. The number can be turned off and on just by touching above the arrow. 

As a Math teacher, I can think of some great ways to use this with the SMART Board. If you have a good idea, please share it in the comment section.

Since I'm discussing number lines, I should also mention the fun number lines in the eManipulatives section at Houghton Mifflin. They really are a lot of fun for practicing skip counting. They have a very simple skip counting number line for K-2 and they have a slightly more advanced number line for Grades 3 - 6 that has a few more options for the teacher.

Please remember to share these resources with the other teachers in your school!

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SMART Boards and Eyeballing Game

I'm hooked! The Eyeballing Game is such a fun way to learn and interact with geometric theorems and shapes that students will be clamoring to get to the SMART Board to try to create a perfect parallelogram!

The application is so simple to use and it works great on a SMART Board. To use the game, students try to complete a task by touching and dragging a small blue box and placing it in the position that best answers the question. In the picture above, I attempted to bisect an angle by eyeballing where the blue line should be. After I moved the line where I thought it should go, I was given feedback on my accuracy. In this example, my guess was 14.3 units away from the actual bisector line.

The game rotates through the seven tasks three times and then provides you with an overall average of your accuracy along with where you rank with the last 10,000 people who have played the game.

I can think of some great ways to use this in the classroom. For example, create three teams of seven and then have the teams rotate through the seven tasks where one player on the team does one task. You can then have an extra task of having the teams calculate their team average. Soon, your students will be using terms like "convergence" and "bisect" in their everyday language!

A big thanks to Mr. Byrne over at Free Technology for Teachers for sharing this site!

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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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