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!

There’s a brand new “Pi Day” lesson in the downloads section of our Educator Resource Center. The file features Teq Learning Objects, songs, videos, and a variety of New York State Assessment questions. For a preview, watch the video below.

Download the lesson here (remember to log-in).

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.

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.

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.

For those early adopters out there who have updated to Windows 7, the good news is that Notebook 10.6 has full support for the new operating system. The bad news is that in order to get the SMART Board working perfectly, you need to make one small change to how Windows 7 deals with touch devices.

If you have a computer running Windows 7 and have been experiencing a problem clicking and dragging objects on the SMART Board, the following instructions will provide an answer:

1. Click Start > Control Panel > Pen and Touch

2. Click the “Panning” tab.

3. Uncheck “Turn on Single Finger Panning.”

Hope this helps! You can now enjoy your SMART Board with all the Windows 7 goodness!

SMART Response XE features full QWERTY keyboard remotes (or clickers), a receiver and powerful assessment software that allows you to easily deliver assessments and evaluate the results. SMART Response XE also offers enhancements to Teacher Tools, such as importing questions and exporting results, and other advanced features.

The new SMART Response XE interactive response system enables teachers to deliver a wide variety of questions, and receive numeric and advanced text responses.

We will let you know more as soon as we get our hands on one.