Teachers Love SMART Boards

SMARTBoards and This is Sand

I hope someone can explain why I like playing with sand so much. Not only can I go out to my backyard and build a sand castle, I can now go to thisissand.com and play all day without getting any sand between my toes.

I wanted to see if this site worked okay on the SMART Board so I just fired up the SMART Board in my office and let my 8 year old daughter play around on the site before she went to school. She was absolutely transfixed by this activity that simply drops sand from anywhere you touch on the SMART Board. If you touch and drag your finger, the sand follows your movements and drops sand from wherever your finger is.

You can use the onscreen keyboard to change the color of the sand and you can double-click to make the sand fall continuously without touching the SMART Board.

So, is there any educational value to this activity? I'll let you play around on the site and discover for yourself.

[WARNING: One of my readers just warned me that there are inappropriate pictures in the Gallery of thisissand.com. Please do not open the Gallery in front of your students.]

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SMART Boards and Befuddlr

It's Friday. The school year is almost finished. What can you do to keep the kids from an impromptu game of "glue the teacher to the chair?"

Why not have the kids play with Befuddlr?!

Befuddlr will take pictures from Flickr (a photo sharing service) and "befuddls" them to create a fun picture puzzle for the kids to solve. It's a perfect application for the SMART Board! It even times how long it takes them solve the puzzle.

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SMART Boards and Music to my Ears

Here's a fun collection of interactive websites related to Music that work great on your SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard. Please use the comment section to share your favorites.

Classics for Kids: Compose Your Own Music

PBS Kids: Thumb Piano Tunes

Pauly's Playhouse: Freaky Frank's Music Machine

Sphinx Kids: Classical Music Interactive Learning & Games

Classics for Kids: The Note Name Game

ArtsAlive: Activities and Games

Dallas Symphony Orchestra: DSO Kids Games

Please share these wonderful resources with the other teachers in your school.

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SMARTBoards and TrainTracker

I wasn't going to mention the site TrainTracker until I saw how completely engaged my 3 year old son became when he started using it.

At first, he just started putting any type of track on the screen and he wasn't overly concerned about where it went. However, when the train didn't go too far, he quicky picked up some spacial relationship skills and soon had the train chugging along the screen. His joy was immeasurable when he clicked "PLAY" and saw the train moving and making noise on the track that he built.

I'm sure TrainTracker will be a big hit in the early primary grades and for older special needs children. It's also one of those great websites to bookmark at home and have your young children learn how to use a mouse while building their own little adventure world.

Teachers could also utilize this site as a fun "memory helper" by drawing out a train track layout on the Smart Board and then see how well the students can recreate the layout using TrainTracker.

If you come up with some other educational uses for this great website, please post your ideas in the comment section!

Thank you Redbridge_ICT for finding this great resource!

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SMART Boards and Eyeballing Game

I'm hooked! The Eyeballing Game is such a fun way to learn and interact with geometric theorems and shapes that students will be clamoring to get to the SMART Board to try to create a perfect parallelogram!

The application is so simple to use and it works great on a SMART Board. To use the game, students try to complete a task by touching and dragging a small blue box and placing it in the position that best answers the question. In the picture above, I attempted to bisect an angle by eyeballing where the blue line should be. After I moved the line where I thought it should go, I was given feedback on my accuracy. In this example, my guess was 14.3 units away from the actual bisector line.

The game rotates through the seven tasks three times and then provides you with an overall average of your accuracy along with where you rank with the last 10,000 people who have played the game.

I can think of some great ways to use this in the classroom. For example, create three teams of seven and then have the teams rotate through the seven tasks where one player on the team does one task. You can then have an extra task of having the teams calculate their team average. Soon, your students will be using terms like "convergence" and "bisect" in their everyday language!

A big thanks to Mr. Byrne over at Free Technology for Teachers for sharing this site!

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SMART Boards and PEEP and the Big Wide World

Do I have a new favorite website? I think that maybe I do!

The website is called PEEP and the Big Wide World and it contains an amazing collection of educational games for the Primary grades.

The graphics, audio, and characters are spectacular and all the games I've played with work great on a Smart Board Interactive Whiteboard. The website is a extension of the TV show that is narrated by one of my favorite people, Joan Cusack.

Here's a brief description of the show:

The animated series PEEP and the Big Wide World gives wings to the innovative idea of teaching science to preschoolers. Wry and distinctive visual humor, charming plotlines, and lovable characters combine with a comprehensive science program to attract and engage kids three to five years old. 

This site is a good example of how interactive educational material should be exposed to students. The site does not contain any advertising and the interactive games can be zoomed to fill the screen. This is extremely important when using a SMART Board with your younger students.

I like using the sitemap for PEEP and the Big Wide World since it organizes all the resources on one page.

I won't spend time any more time telling you about the site since that would take time away from you playing around with the games. If you have some time, why not send a comment and let everyone know what your favorite game is and why. I'll send in my comment after I finish playing around with all the games!

Have fun and get ready to smile! 

Thank you Paul Hamilton for recommending this site on your Free Resources on the Net for (Special) Education blog. Paul's description of the site is much better than mine so if you want some more information, why not check out Paul's blog post about PEEP!

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SMARTBoards and Some Groundhog Day Notebook Activities

Looking for something to do on your SMART Board for Groundhog Day? Here's a Smart Notebook 10 file that contains four Groundhog Day activities.

The first activity (Grade 1-4) allows students to predict if Punxsutawney Phil will see his shadow. This activity uses a neat little table trick developed by yours truly that will make words magically appear after the students drag their choice into the table. When the students are finished, they count the number and then write down the percent for each choice. Teachers will need to change the student names in the table and also duplicate the page as many times as necessary. (Idea inspired by Silvia Tolisano on her blog Langwitches)

The second activity (Grade 1 - 4) is a fun little puzzle of a groundhog developed by Jeni F. after she took my Notebook Applications - Create a Puzzle course. 

The third activity (Grade K-2) was also created by Jeni F. and it let's students guess the different parts of a groundhog.

The last activity (Grade 3-6) is a Punxsutawney Phil trivia game with ten questions. Students touch on the answer they think is correct. If they get it right, the answer will begin to flash.

 

"Don't drive angry. Do not drive angry!"
    ~Phil Conners

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SMART Boards and Smarter than a 5th Grader

Fox's has created a marvelous interactive online version of their "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader" game that works great on a SMART Board.



May I also suggest another way of using this game. You can turn this fun game into a lesson on effective searching methods by taking your students to the computer lab and have them practice finding the answers using Google.

To help you with effective searching strategies, you can use this wonderful guide for searching in Google. It includes 100 tips for searching; tips 1 - 14 are important to understand.

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SMARTBoards and Jeopardy, Jeopardy, and More Jeopardy

(screenshot from Stu's Double Jeopardy)

My blog gets a lot of hits from teachers searching for Jeopardy games to play on their SMART Board. Lately, I've seen some great Jeopardy resources mentioned on my Google Reader list so I thought I would share a few of them here. All of these resources allow you to customize the questions and anwers.

Flash-based Interactive Jeopardy games

Stu's Double Jeopardy (shared by Danny Nicholson at The Whiteboard Blog)

Free Flash Jeopardy Review Generator (shared by Silvia Tolisano's Langwitches blog)

Build Your Own Jeopardy (shared by Tumbl'n Teachers blog)

Smart Notebook Jeopardy Games (these two templates are great!)

Harvey Almarode's wonderful Jeopardy Game Template

Teacher Center of Broome County's outstanding Jeopardy Template

Fun Jeopardy Utility

Grab yourself a whole lot of authentic Jeopardy questions on the J! Archive site. (Shared by Mr. Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers)

Notice that each of these Jeopardy recommendations comes from other blogs or websites. I highly recommend you bookmark or subscribe to each of these amazing sites!

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SMARTBoards and Childtopia

I've just spent the better part of an hour "playing" with an education site called Childtopia. The vast number of interactive resources makes this one of the very best sites available for the SMARTBoard on the Internet.

I played their new detective game, learned how to draw a lion, practiced placing my notes, and checked out my memory. The graphics and feedback are very appropriate for your students. You may have to wait a bit for some of the activities to load but that's to be expected with such outstanding graphics and interactivity.

I played around with about 10 activities and they all worked perfectly on the SMART Board. (Just a note to my U.S. readers, since this site was developed by a company in Spain, it uses Euros on it's money activities)

Here's a quick screenshot of their "games" page that includes literally hundreds of interactive games organized by learning area and age level. When you click on a learning area, it will highlight the games related to that area. When you click on the balloon, it will sort the games by age level.

Please share this site with everyone you know! It's quite simply one of the best resources I've ever seen!

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