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

Cell phones and other mobile devices are becoming fixtures in the lives of today’s students. And many schools are embracing that technology, turning it into part of the learning process. With SMART Response VE interactive response system, students can participate in classroom assessment using their own Internet-enabled devices.

Free as a beta version for current SMART Response users, SMART Response VE is a browser-based tool that lets students respond to questions and quizzes right from their devices. When a teacher creates a question using SMART Notebook collaborative learning software, students can answer it on their mobile devices. Students simply log in to the SMART Response VE web application and they receive their teachers’ questions. A variety of question types, including true or false, yes or no, multiple choice and text answers can be submitted using SMART Response VE.

Sign up for the beta!

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).

Tomorrow and Saturday we will be attending the Celebration of Teaching and Learning at the New York City Hilton. Teq is a premier sponsor of the event and we’ll be conducting several sessions at the SMART/Teq booth (#1204) and eight, 75-minute workshops in the lower level concourses. Click here for a complete list of all of our workshops!

Follow us live from the conference on Twitter.

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.

OE-CAKE acts as a physics-based paint program. Users can insert objects and see them interact under the laws of physics. It has an advanced fluid simulator with support for things such as gases, rigid objects, and even elastic materials. With the escape-codes, users can also mix the properties of elements together. You can even add your own pictures to the simulation!!!

Download OE-CAKE for the Mac here and download it for the PC here.

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.