Teachers Love SMART Boards

SmartBoard Start Center Customization

Here's a free training video on adding a program or application directly to your SmartBoard Start Center. This is a quick and easy way to start a program(s) that you use primarily with your Smart Board.

Smartboard and Starfall

I wanted to share a video with everyone. This is my six year old daughter Jasmine and me playing around on the Starfall website. We've used Starfall with Jasmine for the last couple years and I think it is an outstanding companion to the Smart Board.  Jasmine simply loves using the Smart Board.

Teachers Love SMART Boards in French

I have been playing around with a new tool from Yahoo called Yahoo Pipes. Using this tool, I have created a feed of my blog in French. Users can subscribe to this new version of Teachers Love SMART Boards to receive updates about this blog in French. I have no way of knowing how good the translation is since it's done by a computer but hopefully it will allow me to reach out and share my resource with a broader audience.

Smartboard PowerPoint Resource Page (don't tell anyone)

Shhhhhh...don't tell anyone about this wonderful website packed full of PowerPoint presentations and educational resources covering all subjects under the sun. I'm not even going to mention the name Pete's Power Point Station because then other teachers could just search for it on Google.

Remember...keep this one a secret. If you tell other teachers, they will also have access to all of these wonderful resources and can use them to help their kids learn. Or, if you're someone like me who thinks we should share the our educational knowledge base, you can TELL THE WORLD!

SmartBoard Games for Primary

Last night, I wanted to play a memory game with my six year old daughter using my Smartboard (it's really cool having a Smart Board at home). While searching for a memory game to use, I found a site that has some fun games and activities that would go well with the Smartboard and primary school aged children. These activities are simple, fun, and interactive and I'm sure teachers could find some creative uses for a few of them.

These interactive games for your Smartboard are provide by a company called Entheos. You can play these games without downloading them or you can download the "flash" file and play them independently of the website. Please note that I'm not recommending the "Dementor" game but all the other ones are pretty cool.

Smart Board Comments and ESL

My friend Jon Fisher from Mr. Fisher's Global Learners Blog recently made a comment about my blog entry "Smart Board ESL Website." As educators we must remember that much of the information we receive is viral. What does this mean? It means we hear about great resources through "word of mouth."

This is exactly why blogs are becoming such a wonderful resource for teachers. Comments spark the sharing of ideas and enhance the original blog entry. In the case of Jon's comment (which talked about ESL for early grades),  I reviewed a number of ESL websites that were sent to me from another reader of my blog named Keith. Keith maintains another resource website for Smart Boards.

After reviewing the ESL sites, I am able to recommend the website "manythings." It has some great ESL resources that would work extremely well on a Smartboard. In addition, it has a page titled "Easy Things for Beginners" which provide great resources for the early grades.

This one post contains four great website links for teachers interested in ESL and/or Smart Board resources and was written as a direct result of Jon's comment. Thanks Jon!

SmartBoards: Do We Need Them?

Please watch. It's truly one of the most enlightening and emotional videos I've ever seen.

Smartboard Notebook Lesson Example

I would like to share a Smart Notebook lesson created by a student taking a Technology in Education class. This is one of her first attempts at creating an interactive lesson and I thought she did a great job. She gave me permission to display her lesson and she encourages comments about her lesson.

Smartboard Interactive Websites for High School

Interactive whiteboards are not just for the younger kids. Many great websites exist for High School students as well, including the Chatterbee's website.

Here are my top three favorite things about this site:

1. The In-class presentation page: This page includes links to interactive websites for health & medicine, Science, Social Studies, and History. This is a great resource for students looking for interactive websites to help them with their presentations.

2. The Invisible Web Search page: This page provides a list of some great search engines that help both students and teachers find great educational material. My favorite one is Infomine.

3. The Rocketbee search page: This page provides multiple types of searches all on one page. You can search for pictures, quotations, news, answers to questions, etc. This is a great resource for anyone's bookmark page.

SmartBoard Case Study Article

It's always good to read about how the SmartBoard can make a difference in the classroom. Here's a short article written by Lesley Christianson called Teachers Use Smartboard Technology to Engage Students.

From the article:

“I just got this about a month ago,” Maiers said during class last Friday. “I was a little surprised because there were only a few in the district, so I was excited. I was a little scared because I’m not exactly tech-savvy, so I jumped in with both feet.”