One of my favorite tools from the Lesson Activity Toolkit, is the Checker Tool. It is a great way to create an interactive SMART Notebook page quickly. I also like it because it’s an easy way to provide immediate feedback to students. It is great for labeling diagrams or for fill-in-the-blank activities. I am sure you can find many more uses.

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!

Summer is the perfect time to gain new skills and to brush up on your technology know-how. At the Teq Summer Academy, you’ll have the opportunity to do both, while creating meaningful, interactive lessons for the upcoming school year. In addition, our Instructional Technologists will help you link your lessons to state curriculum standards and develop scoring guides to measure student achievement.

The cost of each session is $25.99, and courses begin Monday, July 26, and run through Friday, August 20. Dates are available at our Long Island, New York City, and Central New York locations.

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!

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.

Google boasts that it has the most ‘hits’ of any website on the Internet, with billions of hits per day. While everyone is familiar with the deceptively simple search engine giant, there are many of us who don’t use its full capabilities.

In almost every search database there is a way to clarify and simplify a search in order to find precisely what a person is looking for. Additionally, since we as educators have to be more and more careful about what we expose our students to, it becomes much more important to censor out all the ‘bad stuff’ and focus in on what we need.

Below is a collection of Google words that, when used in the Google search bar at www.google.com, can narrow the search to only include information that is pertinent.

Word usage and their use in Google searches:

Source: www.googleguide.com

We hope you enjoyed your summer break! We had a busy summer and want to thank everyone who participated in our summer courses. Believe it or not we had the pleasure of working with over 700 teachers this summer and were extremely impressed with your creativity and passion. We learned a lot and hope you did too.

To help ensure a successful start to the school year, we’d like to share 2 new learning objects: a Unit Converter, free this week, and a Memory Card.

There will also be 2 sessions of SMART Boards in Today’s Classroom this Fall: Tuesdays beginning on September 22 (click here to register for Tuesdays) or Thursdays beginning on September 24 (click here to register for Thursdays).  You can also download this PDF for more information on the course.

Have an excellent year and, if you need us, we are here!

About a year ago, we posted an awesome video of a cricket (SMARThropod) we found at the Tequipment home office, which was was taken using the SMART Document Camera. Over the past year, many schools have chosen to invest in this great piece of educational technology.

Recently, IS 228 in Brooklyn had us in for a SMART  Document Camera training with a group of great science teachers. They learned all about using the SMART Document Camera in Notebook 10, as well as working in microscope mode.

One of the teachers prepared a slide of spirogyra, which isn’t all-too-exciting by itself. However, the camera did capture something great from this live sample. While we’re awaiting expert confirmation, it looks a lot like a water bear (tardigrade) is swimming around in the lower-right hand corner.

The teachers were working within Notebook software, which allowed them to annotate directly over the live camera feed. We think this illustrates how the SMART Document Camera is clearly superior to all other microscope cameras, when used in conjunction with a SMART Board. Do you agree?

Visit our site for a complete description of the Academy, along with dates and locations!

Get up to speed with interactive classroom technologies this summer! Today’s students eat, drink, and sleep technology. How can you catch their attention? Increase their classroom participation? Create enthusiasm for learning?

At the Tequipment SMART Board Academy 2009 you will learn how the SMART Board interactive whiteboard is used to create motivational lessons and activities. How it seamlessly integrates with other educational technologies to actively engage your students. How new collaborative web-based software allows the whole world into your classroom and promotes excitement for learning. Experience first hand the SMART-Centric classroom where multiple technologies work in concert to support and monitor student learning.

You will have the opportunity to explore the new SMART Table, SMART Ideas® concept mapping software, Geometer’s Sketchpad® for Mathematics, SMART Response assessment software (formerly Senteo), and so much more. And discover new educational websites and Web 2.0 applications that enhance and support content, anchor concepts, and increase your students’ critical thinking skills.

A huge thank you to everyone who entered! The guesses were all over the scale but, after two days of intense judging (OK, really just a little sunburn from reading entries while sitting around our picnic tables) we have found our winners.

The official weight of the rock is 5,600 lbs

#1: Ms. Rosa Perez-Garcia of Newport News Public Schools submitted on Wednesday @ 11:42PM: “Hello, I am going to guess the rock’s weight in kilograms. I would say it is 2427 kilograms or about 5339 pounds.”

#2: Ms. Sue Palmberg of E.O. Smith High School in Connecticut submitted Wednesday @ 8:13PM: “I think the rock weighs 5320 pounds.”

#3: Ms. JoAnne Disken of Nassau BOCES Model Schools submitted on Tuesday @ 5:47AM: “I guess 2.4 tons or 5291.1.”

Congratulations to our winners and one last shoutout to the TeqSmart rock!

Now, using Notebook 10, teachers have the ability to create captivating effects for their lessons. Watch as we demonstrate how to combine “Object Animation” and the use of color to create fun and motivating reveals. Enjoy!

If you have trouble viewing this video, you can view it on YouTube.