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

Shape Division is a new feature within SMART Notebook Math Tools. When you divide a rectangle once, each new piece can then be divided again. This video shows a brave attempt to divide a rectangle more times, and into more pieces, than any rectangle has ever been divided before (in SMART Notebook Math).

If you’ve divided a rectangle more than 11 times (and kept the fraction clear) please let us know about it!

Sheppard Software designs educational software and free online games/activities. The goal of the company is to create interactive, visual and auditory activities that stimulate thinking. When you mix the learning tools and games from Sheppard Software with the computer/human interface that is the SMART Board you get students and teachers having fun and learning. Any educator from any grade level and any curricular area is going to find something at http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/.

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:

Food based math for the SMART Board.

Math teachers have long enjoyed using food in their lessons.  Whether we use M&M’s to discuss fractions, or pizza to learn about circles,  food can be a fun part of the lesson.  Subway’s recent decision to arrange their isosceles cheese slices in a more “geometrically satisfying pattern,” is the latest opportunity for teachers to integrate food into math lessons.  With the websites below, your SMART Board can be the perfect conduit to make the final connection to the curriculum.

Here are links to two math riddles which can be presented, and solved interactively, on your SMART Board.

Four Friends Need to Cross a Bridge – One Lamp, 17 Minutes.

The Water Jug Puzzle from “Die Hard with a Vengeance.”

Creating fractions has never been easier than with the new Notebook Math Tools feature, shape division. Now when a teacher puts a square or circle on a page and goes to the drop down menu they will see an option for shape division. When they click on this they select how many equal portions they want the shape divided into. Then vwala, an easy way to teach student’s fractions!

Sketch Recognition is the automated recognition of hand-drawn diagrams by a computer.  If all you’ve seen of this is SMART’s Shape Recognition Pen, we think you’ll be amazed by the work being done at MIT and Texas A&M.  The tools they’ve developed allow you to sketch a mechanical system (at an interactive whiteboard), and then see a simulation of your drawing.

SMART Boards have changed the way teachers and students interact with their computers.  Sketch Recognition has the potential to do the same.  Leaders in the area include A&M’s Tracy Hammond, and MIT’s Randall Davis.  Below is a video of Davis demonstrating an early version of a software called Assist.

For more information, visit http://rationale.csail.mit.edu/project_software.shtml

With the recent box-office success of Alice in Wonderland, I was reminded of a terrific graphic organizer that bears the author’s name. Carroll Diagrams are named after author Lewis Carroll.  When categorizing and displaying information, they offer a nice change of pace from Venn Diagrams . They also make terrific activities on a SMART Board.  Below is a simple illustration of a Carroll Diagram, and below the illustration are several links to web sites with Diagrams for Math and Science.

• Regular Polygons, Not Regular Polygons/Quadrilaterals, Not Quadrilaterals
• Various Topics; Multiples, properties of numbers
• Rectangles, Not Rectangles/Red, Not Red
• Classifying Polygons
• Can Fly, Can’t Fly/Bird, Not a Bird
• Number Properties

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!

The “Tiles” activity can be found in the Lesson Activity Toolkit, within the Notebook Gallery.  When clicked, the tiles in this activity will become transparent.  What if the background of Notebook was also transparent?  This video explores how  the new “Transparent Background” tool can be used with “Tiles,” and applications like Google Earth, to create fun activities for your students.

The video below shows how to create an activity where students can “tear” the corners off a triangle and rearrange them along a protractor to demonstrate the Triangle Sum Theorem.