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!

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.

In the “My Content” section of the Gallery, teachers have the  ability to create, and even publish, their own Gallery Collection Files.  When individuals or districts make their galleries available for download, it can be a tremendous resource for the rest of us.  Below we’ve linked to two collections of interactive math content which are available for easy download.  One is from the Lancashire Grid for Learning in England, and the other is from Thomas Vizza’s website MathVizza.com.

For a preview of the content, which will automatically be added to the “My Content” folder of your Gallery, download the following guide from LGLE:  Guide to the Interactive Teaching Programs

Here’s the link which will place those 32 Interactive Teaching Programs in your Gallery:  Math ITP Collection File

Here’s Thomas Vizza’s downloads page: SMART Board Galleries Index from MathVizza.com.

If you know of any other downloadable Gallery Collections, please let us know.

The new SMART Notebook Math Tools Beta, which was set to expire on December 15th, will now be available until January 31, 2010.

To download the Notebook Math Tools Beta Software, or to extend the version you already have, visit the site: http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-US/Support/SBS/SMARTNBMath.htm

If you already have the Beta installed you will find a small file you can download called SMART Notebook Math Tools Beta Extender. Simply download the file and run it on your computer. Your beta expiry date will automatically be changed from December 15th 2009 to January 31st 2010.

This video demonstrates how the tools found in SMART Notebook Math can be used to teach students to write the equation of a line given the coordinates of two points on the line. The new software allows students and teachers to create problems on-the-fly, make connections between their algebraic and geometrical representations, and to check their answers. Topics covered in the video include:

• How to insert a graph into SMART Notebook Math.
• How to plot points and show their coordinates.
• How to generate a table of values from plotted points on a graph.
• How to “recognize math ink” and connect a function to a graph.

Imagine this… You just got home and you sit down to tackle your homework. The first question stumps you… your parents are not home or, parents, you have a hard time helping your child.

Have no fear WolframAlpha is here! This website is dedicated to making knowledge more accessible. On October 21^st the website hosted an interactive web event called Homework Day. Students, of all ages, were able to table their toughest questions and get the answers and help they need. The event was only one day, but the site is here to stay.  All of the submitted questions and a photo gallery of the event are archived on their website.

To get your questions answered on WolframAlpha, simply add your formula or question into the search box and press return. Watch and wait while the site deconstructs your question to generate your answer.  Mathematics, Health, and Finance are just  some topics that the website can assist with.

So the next time you get stumped, visit WolframAlpha.