Hot Spots: Awesome Flash Tool with a Ridiculous Name
We would like to revisit Hot Spots today, because the TeqSmart crew is a little bit taken with it. We’d like to take it out for dinner and a movie. Maybe mini-golf.
The reason for our renewed interest is that we have been running our Summer Training Series and every time we show the LATK (you can say the letters or pronounce it “latke,” which is a tasty potato pancake) to teachers, this is the one that most draws “oohs.” We have found ourselves coming up with more and more uses for Hot Spots.
We’ve gotten ahead of ourselves. For those of you who have not used Hot Spots before. It is a flash item in the Interactive and Multimedia section of the Lesson Activity Toolkit in the SMART Notebook Gallery. The Lesson Activity Toolkit downloads automatically with Notebook 10, but you can download it if you’re still using 9.7 as well by clicking here.
The Hot Spots default is a world map which you can set up by labeling different points. In the classroom, you press Start and students press on the spot they believe matches with the description. It turns global geography into an interactive game. This alone is neat, but there’s more. You can do the same thing with a Venn diagram, the human body, or a numbered grid. Again, nice, but, and this is the kicker…Ready? Give us a second. Okay.
You can insert any picture into Hot Spots. Any map, diagram, photograph, or any other image you can get on your computer. You could have your students play a game to recognize the different elements of a work of art, the individuals in portrait or photograph, architectural features, anatomical features of different species, different elements of figurative language in a poem, and like eleventy billion other things. Our trainer Scott made a page for identifying the members of New Kids on the Block, which is pretty sweet if educationally hollow.
We’re like. We like a lot.
There is only one problem. Now, we hate to criticize SMART, a company we’re big fans of, but, and we mean this constructively: We think the name “Hot Spots” is dumb. It falls short of describing the essence of this awesome tool. It sounds more like a game people play at office retreats or a nickname for a handsome dog.
We have some suggestions for a better name:
- Identify and Locate
- The Awesomator
- Find it!
- Hide and Go Awesome
- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.
The last one might be taken actually. We admit, it’s hard to name these things.
Do you use Hot Spots? What images do you use? Let us know.
October 9th, 2008 at 1:20 am
Hi Teqsmart,
I’m one of the developers on the toolkit, glad you like the hotspots activity. Thanks for the feedback on the name, we’ll consider your suggestions. The name hot spot was supposed to come from the fact that people are used to talking about hot spots in a diagram as pieces of interest in a particular diagram where notes might be added.
One addition to the hot spot you might like is that the new version will have a random order so each time you use it it is different. Coming next year at some point.