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.

While soundboard.com is a great source for ready-made sound clips, sometimes a teacher may want to add their own soundtrack to a lesson to further engage the students. Similar to GarageBand, programmers have developed Myna; a web-based and easy to use dynamic music creation tool.

With Myna, you can:
1. Quickly create tracks and add your own content or instrumentation
2. Export your work as an MP3 for use in a Notebook presentation

The flexibility of this program makes it a valuable resource to educators. It is easy to use and a great way to engage students.

Any soundtrack created in Myna can be downloaded as an .mp3 file. Once it has become an .mp3 file it can then be used in SMART Notebook pages. Download this file to see how Myna can be used with SMART Notebook.

*Important Note: Only .mp3 audio can be added to any SMART Notebook file.

If you do a Google search for “3rd grade interactive websites” you will find 1,020,000 search results. That’s a lot to sort through! Fortunately, Susan Brooks and Bill Byles have spent the last 9 years finding high-quality, free internet classroom resources, and have pulled them all together on their website Internet 4 Classrooms. From their website you can search for lessons and activities by grade level, subject, and standards.

On top of having great interactive websites for students to use (that are perfect for use with a SMART Board).  Internet 4 Teachers also offers technology tutorials and resources. One that I really like is Make Your Own Class Website.

Finally, the Daily Dose provides ideas for “question of the day,” “brain teasers,” and “interesting trivia” that teachers can incorporate into their morning meeting or other daily routines.

The Lesson Activity Toolkit (LAT) in the Smart Notebook Gallery can be pretty overwhelming.  So we thought we would take a moment and point out some of our favorite pieces!

Random Word Chooser

The Random Word Chooser is a great classroom management tool.  Drag the object onto your workspace and type in the names of your students.  From the menu on the bottom, choose the number of students in your class.  When the “Select” button is clicked, the object will randomly choose a student’s name from the list.  If you choose to activate the “No Repeat” option, every student in the class will have to be chosen once before they are chosen again.

Pull Tabs

Creating pull tabs on your Notebook pages is a great way to add extra information to your lesson.  The LAT has a few pull tabs that are pre-made, but will also return to their places when you are finished with them.  Simply pull the Tab out of the Interactive and Multimedia section.  Click on the text to enter your own information.  Place the tab off the page where you would like it be.  Click on the little push-pin.  This will pin that spot as it’s “home.”  When you are ready to use the tab, pull it out of the side of your page, discuss what is on it and then click on the arrow on the bottom of the tab to return it to it’s home.

Let us know what you think!

It’s September, which means it’s not only time for the end of baseball and the start of football, but also for a new school year. If you’ve spent the past few months on vacation, you might have missed some of our posts. You can look back through the previous posts to see what we toiled away on all summer. Some of the highlights to check out include the SMART Table in the News, as well as the myriad state tests we uploaded for use with SMART Response.

A great teacher submitted a file last year that we’d like to showcase again this year. Mrs. Kuchera’s back to school file has been updated to include the newest flash balloons that came with Lesson Activity Toolkit 2.0 (the old ones were frustrating!). There’s also a great histogram activity involving learning styles, complete with a checklist for identifying one’s own style.

We’d like to welcome all of our readers back for another year of great posts, comments, and tweets. Happy new school year!

This summer check out some of the new elementary school lessons that have been posted in the Educators Resource Center!

Math

The Shapes Around Us
This lesson for students in grades K-1 teaches about basic shapes and shows their place in the wold.

Graphing: Favorite Fruit
This interactive lesson is designed for first graders. In this lesson students will create pictographs and answer questions about their data.

Venn Diagrams
In this interactive lesson students will sort and describe shapes using Venn Diagrams. Shapes will be sorted based on if they have corners or not and if they are shaded in or not.

English Language Arts

Similes and Metaphors
This interactive poetry lesson for 5th grade students will allow students to investigate the differences between similes and metaphors, create their own similes and metaphors, and apply the two poetic devices to their own poetry. This lesson includes links to interactive websites.

Long A Word Study
This interactive ELA lesson for first grade students is a great review of words that have the long a sound.

Social Studies

Japan
In this lesson students will learn about Japan. Students will learn about why Japan is known as the “Land of the Rising Sun”, listen to its national anthem, learn words and phrases in Japanese and discover the geography of the area.

Science

Wonderful World of Bats
This interactive cross-curricular lesson designed for 2nd graders explores the world of bats and draws together science (bat sounds are included), ELA (word families), and math (create a graph). Songs, sounds, and a link to an online book reading are some of the activities.

The latest version of Google Earth gives users the ability to create tours that include historical imagery, embedded YouTube videos, and audio narration. The process to create these tours is fairly simple and, depending on the complexity, they can be completed in a relatively short time.

Here are some simple steps to create a virtual tour that can be launched from a Notebook lesson.

Creating Tours

Create and play tours of places and content, or create tours that record your exact navigation in the 3D window. You can also add audio.

1. To record a tour, click the “Record a Tour” button in the toolbar or click “View > Tour.”



2. The record tour controls appear in the bottom left corner of the 3D  window. To begin and end recording, click the Record/Stop button (red dot).
3. To add audio to your tour, click the Audio button (microphone). When you are finished recording your tour, it appears in the Places panel.
4. When you finish recording, click the Record/Stop button. The tour then plays. To save the tour, click the Save button in the playback controls that re-appear. Your tour appears in the Places panel.

Playing Tours

• To play a tour, double click the tour in the “Places” panel. To create and play a new tour of items in “My Places,” select the appropriate folder in the “Places” panel and click the “Play Tour” button. To create and play a new tour of a line (path), select the appropriate line in the “Places” panel and click the “Play Tour” button.
• The tour begins playing in the 3D viewer and the tour controls appear in the bottom left corner of the 3D viewer. To pause or resume the tour, click the Pause/Play button. To fast forward or go back on the tour, click the arrow buttons. To replay the again and again tour, click the Repeat button. Use the tour slider to move to any part of the tour.
• And the best part… you can change the view or turn on/off layers while the tour is playing!

Download a free file that will install a tour into your Google Earth. Having students create a Google Earth tour can be a great way to reinforce lessons in several different content areas. Using Google Earth on a SMART Board is already a fantastic interactive experience; the tours add an entirely new aspect that will encourage students to be creative and inventive.

NOTE: You have to have the latest version of Google Earth (5.0) installed to use the tour features.

Check back soon for advanced techniques to customizing tours based on height, angles, etc.

A huge thank you to everyone who entered! The guesses were all over the scale but, after two days of intense judging (OK, really just a little sunburn from reading entries while sitting around our picnic tables) we have found our winners.

The official weight of the rock is 5,600 lbs

#1: Ms. Rosa Perez-Garcia of Newport News Public Schools submitted on Wednesday @ 11:42PM: “Hello, I am going to guess the rock’s weight in kilograms. I would say it is 2427 kilograms or about 5339 pounds.”

#2: Ms. Sue Palmberg of E.O. Smith High School in Connecticut submitted Wednesday @ 8:13PM: “I think the rock weighs 5320 pounds.”

#3: Ms. JoAnne Disken of Nassau BOCES Model Schools submitted on Tuesday @ 5:47AM: “I guess 2.4 tons or 5291.1.”

Congratulations to our winners and one last shoutout to the TeqSmart rock!

We would like for everyone to try our latest Learning Object, Collapsibles. For the next two weeks we are making Collapsibles free to everyone. All we ask in return is feed back.

• Let us know what you and your students think.
• How you would/did you use it?
• What could we do to make it better?

Enjoy and thanks.

Tables, introduced in Notebook 10, have proven to be a great tool for teachers to create simple activities.  Recently TeqSmart discovered a new way to  use them…

Watch this video to learn the secrets behind the Magic Table Reveal!

If you are having trouble viewing the video you can also view it on YouTube.