Seeing a bird covered in oil is sad. The video below shows how your SMART Board can be used to teach young kids about the work being done by Audobon Volunteers (and others) to save oiled birds.

Seeing oil gushing uncontrolled into the Ocean is scary.  When early elementary-age students ask about the spill, The National Wildlife Fund has suggestions on how to discuss the issue so they will continue to  feel safe, and connected to the natural world. Their website also links to lesson plans on Wetlands and the Gulf Oil Spill.

Here are two examples of kids making a difference for the Gulf Coast Recovery effort.

Turning Lemonade into Help for the Gulf Spill

Fifth-grader Olivia Bouler’s artwork raises $125,000 for Gulf birds

Sheppard Software seems to be no stranger to differentiated instruction. You’ll find many topics with levels of difficulty starting with easy, for primary students, through to levels that will challenge adults (Think you really know where the states are? Try this game ).

The quick links give you a glimpse of what is available. And the list of popular games hints at what people are finding particularly valuable right now. But don’t take our word for it. Go and explore. You’ll be amazed at what you find. It is good that you have the summer to explore the free learning games on this site because it will take all summer to peruse. View one of my daughter’s favorite activities:

To set up a Checker Tool activity:

1. Bring the checker tool from the LAT.

2. Click on the double arrows in the top left corner of the tool.

3. Type exactly what you want as the correct answer.

4. Decide if you want capitalization to be checked.

5. Click “OK.”

6. On the same page, type possible answers that student can choose to drag to the Checker Tool (I like to make these possible answers “infinite cloner” so that the they don’t get used up).

7. When students drag possible answers to the Checker Tool, they immediately know if they are correct or incorrect. You can drag new answers right on top of existing answers and it will replace them.

“Check” it out!

How many of us have tons of word lists already typed into Microsoft Word?  Bringing them into Notebook one at a time, so they will move as independent objects, is — pun intended — a drag!

To save time, I have started using my new favorite Lesson Activity Toolkit interactive item, the Text Splitter. Simply copy and paste your text from Word into Notebook and then drag and drop it into the Text Splitter. It will split your list into words or break them down even further, by letter.

This is a great time saving device!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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