TeqSmart: Blogging About SMART Boards, Resources, Lessons, Training, Games…

New York City teachers are headed back in their schools and many schools are already back in session. Didn’t the summer just start? What happened?

The TeqSmart Blog is still on location in Chicago, but we’re hard at work, too. Yesterday, for instance, we did a marathon training day of three schools, three trainings, three hours each. In the words of Barney Stinson, it was legen…wait for it…this never gets old…dary! It was one of those days that puts the TeqSmart crew in the realm of Bill Brasky…or at least Holiday Inn’s Joe Polski.

For those of you getting back in the swing of things, here are some resources to help you out:

Arcademic Skill Builders: TeqSmart trainer Scott found this website which has a number of interactive games for students building basic math skills. Students solve math problems in racing, meteor-destroying, and many other action-packed games. Students can play alone or against others from all over the world. While checking this site out, we accidentally entered into a multi-player game against the elementary school students the site is designed for. After thirty minutes, we started to feel guilty of continually beating eight year olds, but they should realize that the TeqSmart Crew does not back down. Suzie0801, you may have one the last bout, but we’ll take you down next time…It’s a really good website.

The Educator Resource Center: This is our depository of SMART Board lessons we like to post every now and then for those new to our site.

Scholastic’s SMART Board Lessons: This is another repost, but if you missed it you should definitely check out the lessons Scholastic is making.

Best of luck! We’re hopping a plane back to home base!

Hello from Skokie! The TeqSmart blog is coming to you from a different time zone this week, and the hour difference is only throwing us off a little. We hope everyone had an awesome weekend. We are super stoked because:

1. The United States men’s and women’s basketball teams won gold.
2. We made it to Chicago without delay, cancellation, or impromptu train ride to Washington, D.C.
3. We are excited about our trainings this week at Chicagoland Jewish High School, Solomon Schecter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago, North Shore Congregation Israel Goodman Center for Jewish Education, Arie Crown Hebrew Day School, Hanna Sacks Bais Yaakov High School, Ida Crown Jewish Academy, and West Suburban Temple Har Zion.
4. There is a Panera on one side of our hotel and a Chipotle on the other.

And here’s one more reason to be happy: We found a post on the NCS-Tech blog, written by a teacher in Northfield, New Jersey explaining that Google Earth Pro, which costs $400, is free for educators. We recommend checking out this blog as well if only for phrases like “CRAZY MAD AWESOME plugins.” We know he is referring to plug-ins for Google Earth, but we’d like to pretend he’s talking about Glade PlugIns, the plug-in air freshener. “Bro, I have got some CRAZY MAD AWESOME plugins! You should come over and smell the wicked sweet Lilac Spring!” As a blog that occasionally (read: daily) uses the word awesome, we are already fans of NCS-Tech.

As he explains in his post, Google Earth Pro has a lot of great features and functions to check out. We recommend taking advantage of this opportunity. Here’s a copy and paste directly from the NCS-Tech on how to download GEP for free:

Basically, all you have to do is download the PRO trial version at http://earth.google.com and then forward the answers to these questions to GEEC [at] google.com:

1. Your name (key contact person)
2. Organization / Institution
3. A brief description of the Institution / Organization
4. Full mailing address
5. Telephone number
6. User name (complete email address that will be assigned to the license key)
7. Institution’s web address
8. Your Institution’s Tax ID (if applicable)
9. Your Institution’s 501©3 number (US only, if applicable)
10. A description of the intended application including grade level(s), discipline(s) or subject.
11. What features in Google Earth Pro are important to you and how do you wish to use them in your classroom.
12. Number of computers you are requesting to download this software on.
13. Prior license key information.

PLEASE NOTE: Applicants are required to download the free, 7-day trial version of Google Earth Pro at http://earth.google.com/ before applying. Please be sure to include your Google Earth trial account user name and license key above.

For those of you unfamilar with Google Earth, please check out our previous post on this subject.

Let us know if you use Google Earth. Also, feel free to add to the Comments section any ideas for where we should go while we’re in Chicago.

How awesome was this week?

We know a lot of teachers are looking at the calendar, scratching their heads, and puzzling on how the time flew by so quickly. Can it really be almost September?

It’s true, but:

• It’s still summer.
• The Olympics are on.
• We’ve been having a lot of fun at some great schools.

Here at the blog, we had another productive week, posting now for the fifth straight day. Since Monday, we added some new links from our friends, uploaded a fantasy football draft board, let you know about poets.org, awarded cookies, and explained how to customize the toolbar for NBX.

Also, we’re hard at work getting people to say NBX instead of Notebook 10.

We want to thank Pam S., Vickary, and Sarah for posting this week as well as…um…well this person identifies himself as McLovin. Who are we to question?

Thanks again to Sandry Krochek and Louise Enea for supplying the links.

Next week the TeqSmart blog is coming to you from Chicago, Illinois. Have a great weekend!

Did you know you can customize your toolbar in Notebook 10? Did you know that sugar is the main export of the island nation of Mauritius? If you answered no to either of these questions, you should keep reading.

The toolbar in Notebook 10 has a number of buttons set as defaults, but you can choose to remove buttons you don’t use and add additional buttons. To customize the toolbar, right click (Control-click for Mac) on the toolbar.

To add a new button to the toolbar, click and drag it in. To remove a button, drag it from the toolbar into the customize menu. Pin Page is a new button that was added with Service Pack 1. When you are in Dual Page Display, you can press Pin Page and it will pin down one page so it will remain up as you flip through your other pages.

You can also add buttons for the Floating Keyboard, Show Links, Print, the SMART Recorder, and Zoom. We strongly suggest that teachers customize their toolbars not just for the useful buttons, but also to look like pros in front of their colleagues. We present this dramatization:

Teacher 1: Wow! Look at your toolbar! It’s got Pin Page.
Teacher 2: Yeah, I modded out my NBX, yo.
Teacher 1: What happened to the Paste button?
Teacher 2: It bored me so I tossed it.

In related news, we’ve decided that NBX is the hip way of saying Notebook 10. We’re going to make this happen.

Congratulations to Vickary for winning our prize by correctly identifying yesterday’s quote came from Princess Bride. Your cookie will be mailed to you by the end of the week. Coming in a close second with the challenge was Sarah. Because we’re very giving, Sarah will also get a cookie, but not as big a cookie as Vickary.

See you tomorrow. Let us know if you customize NBX.

Today we want to share a resource a teacher told us about at a training in Manhasset yesterday. Poets.org is a giant collection of poetry and information about poetry. It is full of poet biographies, interviews, tips for aspiring poets, and lots of other materials. Their large library is a great resource for teachers.

For the SMART Board, we like it because of the audio and video resources. You will find recording of poets reading their own material, reading other poets’ material, and discussing their work and the nature of poetry.

Check it out and let us know what you think. Also, the first person to post in the Comments section the source of the title of today’s post wins a cookie. The second person to post it might also win a cookie.

On a final note, our Notebook Fantasy Football Draft Board worked awesomely yesterday. We breezed through 15 rounds in no time. Thanks, SMART!

When we talk about SMART Notebook, we usually focus on it as software for creating interactive lessons, but it has other uses.

Notebook 10 is a great tool all kinds of classroom lessons and activities, but it is also a user-friendly drawing program. Being able to make unwanted parts of an image transparent, easily manipulate text and images, and utilize a gallery full of useful clipart make the Notebook useful for simple graphic design projects. The SMART Board transformer from a few weeks ago, for instance, was created using Notebook. The new fill options for objects and backgrounds in Notebook 10 only increase its awesomeness for creating graphics.

The TeqSmart crew has also put the Notebook to its own selfish use and made a draft board for our fantasy football league draft. As we believe in sharing our resources, click here to download the Notebook Fantasy Football Draft Board.

What else do you use SMART Notebook for?

Friends are awesome. What you may not know is that blogs, just like people, can have friends. I expect this to be a theme of an upcoming episode of Sesame Street.

We posted a link to ICT Games a little while ago that was provided by TeqSmart friend Sandy Krochek. She very kindly posted some additional links in our Comments and we wanted to highlight one in particular:

Priory Woods School in Middlesbrough, England has a number of useful downloads for special educators using SMART Boards. The most intriguing to us were the Interactive Talking Books. Check out the site and let us know what you think.

We also made a new friend on our trip to Florida. Louise Enea of Lehrman Community Day School in Miami Beach sent us this link to the Visible Body. Visible Body provides interactive three-dimensional diagrams of the human body, including the major organ and body systems. It looks pretty awesome for the SMART Board.

Thanks again, Sandy and Louise! You rule! We always appreciate discoveries and suggestions. You can always comment or email us at training@tequipment.com.

Q: How was Miami?
A: Fantastic.
Q: How was the drive from Miami to Tampa?
A: Long.

The TeqSmart crew is very grateful to all the schools that we have visited on our trip thus far: Lehrman Community Day School, Hochberg Preparatory School, RASG Miami Hebrew Academy, and Congregation Bet Breira. Tomorrow, we are visiting Hillel School of Tampa and Pinellas County Jewish Day School. We anticipate more awesomeness.

We’ve been driving all around the state of Florida showing them how we do SMART Boards up in New York and it’s been a lot of fun. While some of us are living it up in the Sunshine State, others will be leading the final day of our summer training series. We also need to thank all of our participants who made this summer so much fun. It’s been a lot fun.

Now, to the good news. Scholastic has put up new SMART Board lessons. They added six more, all of which are back-to-school activities. We are big fans of Scholastic, but we would like them to hop to it and make more lessons! Seriously guys, six? We could make six quality lessons before breakfast.

Not to brag.

Let us know what you think of Scholastic’s lessons. Also, if you’re new to reading the blog, say hi.

Before we jump into today’s post, let us just say, we did not quite make it to Miami as we had planned. Flight cancellations in New York sent us into a non-stop stream of phone calls and the discovery that the only way to get to Florida out of New York in the next few days involves layovers in both the North and South Poles and us riding in the cargo section with hundreds of live chickens. So, we took a late night train to Washington, D.C. We arrived just in time to see the very end of NBC’s coverage of an amazing U.S. victory in the 4 X 100 meter freestyle swimming relay race. How cool are the Olympics, by the way?

Barring any further incident, we will land in Miami this evening. We apologize to the schools we were supposed to train today, and to our loyal readers who expected a post from Miami Beach this morning.

Now, to the business at hand. Teachers often ask us about how to find  grants in order to get more SMART Boards and other educational technology into their classrooms. Today we want to link to our Educator Resource Center’s Grants and Funding Resources for Educators. You will find a number of sources for possible funding.

Does anyone else have other sources for grants and other resources? Let us know.

Check in with us tomorrow when we’ll be writing from Miami. Seriously. We mean it this time.

Did we post every day this week? Yes. We even posted on Sunday. This is the first time in our proud history that we put up new material every day. Thank you for not pointing out that yesterday’s post was two sentences long.

To follow up this week’s landmark, we are going to bring you another first next week. The TeqSmart blog is hitting the road and coming to you on location in Miami, Florida. So, if the blog smells different next week, it’s mostly likely our sun screen.

Have a great weekend, everyone. Remember, the end of summer is just the beginning of the football season.