Seeing a bird covered in oil is sad. The video below shows how your SMART Board can be used to teach young kids about the work being done by Audobon Volunteers (and others) to save oiled birds.
Seeing oil gushing uncontrolled into the Ocean is scary. When early elementary-age students ask about the spill, The National Wildlife Fund has suggestions on how to discuss the issue so they will continue to feel safe, and connected to the natural world. Their website also links to lesson plans on Wetlands and the Gulf Oil Spill.
Here are two examples of kids making a difference for the Gulf Coast Recovery effort.
Turning Lemonade into Help for the Gulf Spill
Fifth-grader Olivia Bouler’s artwork raises $125,000 for Gulf birds
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.
Many of us here remember the Schoolhouse Rocks video for “How a Bill Becomes a Law.” Perhaps you’ve even shown your students. It’s a super catchy tune, although the animation is a bit, well it’s a bit 1970′s.
Jump forward 35 years, and iCivics.com is here to help today’s students learn all about those bills on Capitol Hill. There’s a series of games they can play to learn about each branch of government and rights protected by constitutional amendments. In “Do I Have a Right?” students play a partner in a law firm, analyzing clients cases, and referring them to lawyers who specialize in a particular protection.
The site is the vision of Sandra Day O’Connor, and was built to address the lack of information all students need so that they engage in civic participation. We posted on a related website in a previous post.
How long do you spend looking for the perfect image for your Notebook file? How long is too long? The answer depends on the person, but one way to reduce the amount of time you spend looking for that “perfect” image is to use Google Image Swirl! (http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/)
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:
First, obtain new fonts. To do this you can pick up a CD at the store or go online and download some. I use, 1001freefonts.com. I typically save them to my desktop. If the file is zipped right click on it and extract all to you desktop. Open the new folder so that you can see the file for the new font. The icon for the font file will most likely be either TT (True Type) or O (Open Font).
After getting the new font I go to my windows start menu, click on the computer option and from there choose my C Drive.
Once in your C Drive, open up the windows folder, click on the font folder and from there it is, easy as pie, just drag and drop the font into the folder.
*Note: if the new font cannot be installed on a school computer, and you want the font in SMART Notebook, it is not at all difficult. Create your lessons, on the computer with the new font. Then make liberal use of the Camera Capture Tool Bar. The text will be come un-editable, but if the Picture of the text is taken on the page, with the background color you will be using, the kids will never know!
Just remember if the font isn’t on the computer you open your Notebook lesson on, and you didn’t use the screen capture, then the font will revert to one on the computer.
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.
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.
You can use text, image and videos to study almost any subject. (more…)
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