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

So, we are back from FETC and, “our minds’ are a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought, cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives***.” Our imaginations are a blaze, and our feet are still barking.

On a more serious note FETC was an amazing, dare I say awesome, conference. The people were friendly, the presenters were good, the vendor hall was GINORMOUS, and the weather . . . well the weather left a little to be desired but 3 our of 4 ain’t bad.

We will be posting many new and useful links to the LINKS section of the ERC. In fact we picked up so many cool new sites we are creating a new list category called FETC 09.

Cool things we saw at FETC: Well SMART was there and commanded quite an audience. The SMART Table seemed like a huge hit. Just in case you missed it SMART has a new collaborative multitouch table that is a lot of fun. We have one as a matter of fact and if you would like to schedule a visit feel free to contact our sales department. SMART also announced their new Classroom Suite software. The package includes Notebook 10 (NBX), SMART Sync (formally SychronEyes), the Student edition, and some great new admin tools.

We also attended many amazing presentations. There were many that we enjoyed but two come to mind right now. Both were based on the use of new Web 2.0 apps to create student centered projects. As we mentioned we will be adding all of these resources to the Links section of the ERC but here are a few just to wet your appetite.

CK12 FlexBooks: Making good choices, reading smart, and saving and organizing their knowledge is key to being good producers. Textbooks will be created and recreated by those who use them. What do they need to help them do this?

ArtPad: Have your students create their own personal masterpiece. Or have them create a graph, concept map, etc. and then watch how it was created. What a great memory aid.

Crappy Graphs: Because “Awesome graphs” sounded way too pretentious! This tool allows you to create your own ‘crappy’ graphs very quickly without have to go through all the trouble of creating them in excel. Great for showing a concept quickly and in a fun way. Even better, once you have created your masterpiece you can submit it to the website for everyone to see.

Here’s a fun example we created earlier:

Stay tuned for further updates!

*** source = Hedy Lamarr (It’s HEDLEY!)

For anyone interested in a fun Christmas activity for the SMART Board, try The Gingerbread Man with Everything. You can create your own gingerbread man and upload it to a gallery which includes some great designs. There’s a gingerbread viking, samurai, and lucha libre.

Our series of posts on Senteo 2 will continue next year.

Enjoy!

Did we post every day this week? Yes. We even posted on Sunday. This is the first time in our proud history that we put up new material every day. Thank you for not pointing out that yesterday’s post was two sentences long.

To follow up this week’s landmark, we are going to bring you another first next week. The TeqSmart blog is hitting the road and coming to you on location in Miami, Florida. So, if the blog smells different next week, it’s mostly likely our sun screen.

Have a great weekend, everyone. Remember, the end of summer is just the beginning of the football season.

We woke up this morning, brushed our teeth, got dressed, at some breakfast, sat down to watch SportsCenter (Manny to the Dodgers? Crazy!) and then yelled to ourselves, “Oh man! It’s August already!” That’s right the end of the summer is closer than we realized. Oh, also we put on deodorant this morning. We don’t want you to think we forgot that.

We had a good last week of July.  Our Monday post on blogging in education got some excellent comments. We want to thank Josh of Technology Fridge and Yabut. Thanks for commenting and we encourage people to check out Technology Fridge where we found some great resources.

Wednesday we wrote about Hot Spots, the (in our humble opinion) poorly named flash item in the Lesson Activity Toolkit. Yesterday’s we posted some resources for music teachers looking for a virtual keyboard or piano for the SMART Board.

Thanks to all of our readers. We’ve got a big week coming up. We’re going to write a post about this. We won’t say anything else for now, but we’re very interested. In addition, you can expect another TeqSmart original video. Check in next week.

Have a great weekend.

Hello readers. As we write this, we assume most of our readers are in their cars on the way to a relaxing beach weekend or on their way back home for a 48 hour nap. We assume they will still read this as they lay out on the sand or while they sleep. You might think the latter is unlikely, but we will have some loyal readers.

This was a totally sweet week at the TeqSmart Blog. Yes, we only posted once this week, but did you see our SMART Board transformer? And we had a great week with our summer academy, meeting a lot of great people and having a lot of fun with our trainings.

We want to thank Jason Nast from SMART for commenting this week and we hope to keep hearing back from everyone next week. Have a great weekend. Check back in with us next week for more awesomeness.

It’s been a few weeks since we last had a Friday wrap-up, and a lot’s changed since then. We started our summer training series and we added a new trainer, Scott.

We would like to thank all of our loyal readers and apologize for not giving them the Wrap-Up. Let’s kick this off:

Monday we wrote about SMART preparing to sell their one millionth board and we gloated. We’ve continued gloating, possibly more than is socially acceptable for a group of technology trainers in khakis and company polos. We are hoping that we get to see the one millionth SMART Board. In our minds, it’s made of solid gold and can fly. It might also be sentient in a “Johnny Five is alive” kind of way. We’re prepared to be disappointed.

We wrote about Gapminder.org, an excellent SMART Board resource. We were pleased in the comments to hear from someone involved in the Gapminder Foundation. We received another comment with a question that we do not know how to answer. Let us quote:

“Is the Trendalyzer software still available, or are the graphs only available through webservice?”

If anyone knows, please feel free to chime in.

Yesterday, we posted about a monthly contest SMART will run from now through October. We hope everyone checks that out, and we’d love to hear one of our readers one a prize pack.

That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend, and we’ll see you in a couple days for more awesomeness.

(In order to fully enjoy today’s wrap-up, please play It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye to Yesterday by Boyz II Men while reading.)

So, the school year is over. Students are enjoying the completion of another grade, and some are moving on to college and careers. Teachers are taking a well-deserved exhale, and some are taking some time to relax. To those of you about to teach summer school, we salute you.

How would we describe the last school year here at TeqSmart? In a word: Awesome.

We met a lot of great teachers, worked in a lot of great schools, trained teachers to use SMART Boards, Notebook software, AirLiner, Senteo, SynchronEyes, SMART Ideas, and other educational technology.

We will be hard at work all summer with more trainings and our Summer Institute.

We would like to thank all of our readers and commentors for all of their support. Yesterday we recapped our favorite blog posts from the past year. We look forward to a productive summer providing educators with SMART Board lessons and other SMART Board resources.

Keep checking in throughout the summer for updates on Notebook 10, contests, and other awesomeness.

We would like to thank the schools we worked with this week:

Tottenville HS, Gotham Professional Arts Academy, Bronx Center for Science and Math, High School for Public Service, Solomon Schecter of Marlboro, Saint Joseph School of Manhattan, Yeshiva Toras Emes, A Fantis School, PS 163Q, Young Adult Borough Center, Lincoln Orens MS, PS 11Q, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, PS 101K, Prospect Park Yeshiva, North Shore Hebrew Academy, Lafayette High School, Bishop Dunn Memorial, and NYIT.

We wanted to thank of all the schools we work with, but it’s a loooooong list.

Congratulations teachers, students, and graduates. See you next week.