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:

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.

Denise wrote us to say, “I LOVE the SMART Response clickers.  I am still learning, but have had great success with them already–the kids love them too.  Thanks so much–there are not enough words to say thanks!!!”

She was also kind enough to send us a couple of pictures. A funny aside, Denise said she used the Random Name Generator from the Lesson Activity Toolkit (download here) to help her determine which students where chosen for the picture w/ the SMART Board.

We want to say thank you to Denise and her students for the great pictures!

This site can help minimize the amount of time you spend searching for pictures online. Just type in your search term, and the site organizes the pictures they have located into categories. Click on the image that you fancy and watch the “picture map” unfold to help you choose the ideal picture.

Once you have placed an image onto your Notebook page, don’t forget to add these images to your “My Content” folder so you have access to them whenever you’d like. To add a picture:

• Open your Gallery tab
• Select your “My Content” folder
• Drag the picture from the Notebook page to the folder
• Click on the “Pictures” bar and your image should be there

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!

National Atlas Map Maker has just about everything Social Studies folks could want. Yet for the budding environmentalists in your classrooms, there are maps that deal with pollution, environmental issues, natural/physical geography, etc. As you can see in the image, the categories are varied.

A map lover could easily get lost in all of the options available with the National Atlas Map Maker.   Each layer brings you more  information, such as agriculture and/or natural resources and their impacts on the environment. There is a layer that has historical maps of peoples and population changes over time, and border changes over the last 234+ years.

When using Notebook 10.6 (NBX6), use the Transparent Background to seamlessly integrate the National Atlas and NBX without having to flip between windows.

Two programs which make advanced interactions between applications possible.

Nail it is a very small program (33 KB) which will have a big impact on how you think of the Digital Ink Layer.  Nail it is free, and it enables you to make any application window “sticky” (so that it will stay on top of all other programs), simply by clicking on it.  When you use Nail it, the application you click on is on top of every- thing, even the Digital Ink Layer.  For an example of how this can work with SMART Notebook, watch the video below.

Ghost It allows you make any window into a Ghost Window.  A Ghost Window is translucent, and will always appear on top of other windows, but when a Ghost Window is not in focus, all clicks will pass right through it—until it becomes the active window again. Watch the video below for more details.