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

Your SMART Board is an amazing tool for engaging your students’ many intelligences. Multiple Intelligence Theory suggests that all students posses skills within seven different intelligence areas.

It is in our best interest to use multiple activities in order to involve our students’ most developed intelligence in active learning. By getting students to come to the board and manipulate “information,” we access their “spatial” intelligence as well as “bodily-kinesthetic” intelligence.

But let’s take it up a notch with the kinesthetic movement.

We don’t just want some movement here, we really want to get our students dancing while they are up at the board. So we have to create “buttons” for them to touch that are far apart from each other. For those shorter students, we can get them jumping to reach the “buttons.”

An example that comes to mind is a flash card activity with mathematics. But this could be applied to any question and answer game in any content area. For my activity, I have created a Notebook 10 file. Each page in the file has a math question and two answer buttons that are links to other pages in the file (see images). I would instruct students that they have to start with their feet touching a strip of tape which is about three feet from the wall. The instructions include having to return your feet to the tape after every touch on the board. Making them return serves two purposes. First, it gets them moving, a lot. Second it moves them back from the SMART Board so they can more easily read the question and view the possible answers.

This type of activity can be applied to any subject and Q&A scheme. One thing to keep in mind; make sure you check all the links before having students use the file. Remember, you need to  create a “try again” page for each question. It is all easy enough to do, but a little time consuming.

If you are pressed for that ever-precious resource we call “time” and you teach multiplication, I have found some online math activities that would require some movement and could meet the same purpose as the activity that I have described above. The great part is that they are already created for you. The following site contains some great activities http://www.multiplication.com/interactive_games.htm. My very favorite is “Disco Dino”. The music is funky and smooth! See Disco Dino at http://www.multiplication.com/flashgames/DiscoDino.htm.

How are you going to build the link between your students’ bodily-kinesthetic intelligence and their other developed intelligences? What other intelligences can we activate with the SMART Board? Get Moving!

Designing engaging, dynamic, and interactive lessons is the key to using SMART Notebook to its full potential. One way to spice-up your page is using image fill as a fill effect.

The trick to remember about image fill, whether you are using this to fill a background or to fill a shape, is that you have to save a picture as a file on your computer. Images from the gallery cannot be used in this way. Here is what I recommend:

1. First, visit a website that you like to use to find images. For example, images.google.com or bing.com/images will allow you to search for any image you’d like. Whichever site you end up using is fine. Remember, after you type in your search term, click on the thumbnail view of the image so you can access the full size image.
2. After the page has loaded with the full size image, you will want to right click and then select “Save Picture As…” or “Save Target As…” Choose where on your computer you want to save this picture, name the file, and then press “Save.”
3. Now, when you are creating a page for your lesson and you want to add an image to fill the background, all you have to do is open up the Properties tab in Notebook, select “Fill effects” from the menu, select “Image fill” and click “Browse” (just below the blue square).
4. After you select browse, you have to find the picture on your computer. Once it is located, select it, click “Open,” and the image should be placed on the background or within the shape you have chosen to fill.

A tip to remember is that if you have a small image and are using it for the background, the image will begin to tile. To avoid the tile effect, search for images that are 800×600. For example, if I wanted to search Google images for a picture of the ocean that is 800×600 my search term will look like this “ocean picture 800×600.”

Using a small image to fill the background is possible. All you have to do is place the picture as an object on your notebook page. Position it into the top left hand corner of your screen. Using the resizing circle you are going to pull the picture all the way over to the right and then down so that the image will fill the page. Don’t forget to lock the picture in place so that it cannot be moved.

Hola everyone and welcome back!

I wanted to pick-up where we left off last Monday. The following videos will further demonstrate how we can blur the lines between content and the tools we use to access that content. In this first example I created a supportive research environment using the Transparent Background option in Notebook 10.6, a web browser, and Diigo.

In this next example I revisit the use of the Transparent Background and an old NY state exam found on Regents prep. It’s funny really, because I went back and examined my original video and saw that I was still allowing older tools to define my use (change is a slow process). So, here is another attempt that should make things much easier.

Thanks for watching everyone!

It is that time of year again, and those of us here at Tequipment are in the spirit of giving! If you’re looking for holiday activities to use in your classroom, check out The Polar Express lesson. This file was created to be used in conjunction with the popular book by Chris Van Allsburg. Within this file there are many interactive activities that will help your students practice their researching skills, increase their vocabulary, track narrative elements, and explore cross-curriculum concepts.

Visit the Downloads section in the Educator Resource Center (ERC) to download the Polar Express lesson and customize it to fit your classroom’s needs. Don’t forget to click on the attachments tab for a Word document describing how to use and edit the file. Happy Holidays!

We’ve created a file on our Educator Resource Center for the anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. Download it here.

Google boasts that it has the most ‘hits’ of any website on the Internet, with billions of hits per day. While everyone is familiar with the deceptively simple search engine giant, there are many of us who don’t use its full capabilities.

In almost every search database there is a way to clarify and simplify a search in order to find precisely what a person is looking for. Additionally, since we as educators have to be more and more careful about what we expose our students to, it becomes much more important to censor out all the ‘bad stuff’ and focus in on what we need.

Below is a collection of Google words that, when used in the Google search bar at www.google.com, can narrow the search to only include information that is pertinent.

Word usage and their use in Google searches:

Source: www.googleguide.com

Our Courts is a website envisioned by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that is dedicated to teaching students about 21st century civics. The website includes lesson plans, games and a place where students can send messages back and forth with Justice O’Connor.

While you’re teaching about goverment also check out Alex Kane’s Bill of Rights Lesson from our Educator Resource Center. This lesson describes and reinforces students understanding of the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution. After the lesson, go back to the Our Courts website and have students review what they learned by playing the Do I have a Right? game.