My Top 5 Favourite Interactives in the SMART Notebook Gallery

I just finished Day 1 of 2 of SMART Board professional development workshops with a great group of educators at Holy Family Catholic Regional Division in Peace River, Alberta.  We focused on the 3 areas in the classroom that an interactive whiteboard can help enhance including increasing student interactivity.

During today's workshop, we took some time exploring the gallery components in SMART Notebook (nearly 7000 items, and counting).  The idea for a blog post was inspired by this discussion and exploration -- I thought it was time that I shared my top 5 favourite interactive components in the gallery.

In no particular order, here they are:


1. Random Word Chooser

The uses for this flash file are endless -- insert students' names and select volunteers for activities, sharing answers or forming groups; insert key vocabulary in your subject area and use for a simple review game; insert themes or genres of writing and have students randomly select their topic for creative writing.

2. Dice -- Keyword

Click on the double arrows on the top left corner and edit it to fit your own subject area's content.  Have students click to 'roll' the die at the end of class and tell you something they learned about that term in today's class.  Voila! Easy-to-create digital exit questions.

3. Interactive Protractor

This upgraded version actually exists on the toolbar in Notebook version 10.6 (although a similar older version exists in the gallery too!).  I love the fact that if you click the bottom right arrow, it 'spits out' the angle complete with degrees.

4. Vortex Sort - Image

An excellent review activity for the end of a lesson or, even better, a great inquiry activity with feedback for students to test their theories.  Make each vortex rotate, customize the images and categories and have students drag each image to sort them.  If they place the image in the correct vortex, the clipart fades inward; if they get it wrong, the vortex spits it back out. 

5. Froguts

An old classic fun interactive.  This flash file allows you to virtually 'dissect' a frog -- minus the terrible smell! While educationally valuable in Biology class, this is also a fun way for kids to experiment and see the inside of frog -- even if they're not currently in Bio.

Please comment and share your favourite interactive gallery items.  I look forward to sharing in future professional development workshops!

Vanessa

I Can Take a Picture of What?

I'd like to start this post by taking a minute to thank the staff of Hunting Hills High School in Red Deer, Alberta. I just spent the past 2 days leading workshops with the Math/Science department and the Humanities department and had a lot of fun with the participants on each day. They were a great group of fantastic educators with lots of ideas, great energy and varying levels of background knowledge with SMART products.


Now onto my post...with so many tools in SMART Notebook, the floating toolbar and the control panel, it's easy to overlook some of the features that are available to you. Unless you have time to sit down and thoroughly experiment with all the the icons, buttons and links, I find that most users initially find a level of comfort with using "main" tools in their classroom and don't dive into the rest.

One of my favourite tools that I believe gets overlooked far too often is the area capture tool. When it is selected, it's own mini toolbar follows you into any program or website, and allows you to take a picture of an rectangular area, a window, your desktop or an area drawn by freehand.

Why do I like it so much?

• It's super easy to use (even the most introductory users can grasp the concept and implement it immediately)
• The picture is instantly embedded into a SMART Notebook file, so that you can manipulate it like any other object on a page
• The applications for use are endless -- screen shots to demonstrate a new skill, area captures of a website that your students explored to use as a visual reference, introducing layering in art (by taking freehand captures of vegetation, animals, people, etc. and building a new scene), the list could go on and on
  

But my favourite reason that I like this tool? Because of the wonderful reaction I get from "1st-time viewers" of its use, "I can take a a picture of WHAT?"

Vanessa :)