Teachers Love SMART Boards

SMARTBoards and Wordle

I have a draft about a website called Wordle that I was planning on posting next week. However, I found a much better post about Wordle that also has a fun lesson plan. The post called Wordle: Using Word Clouds in a Lesson comes from one of my favorite blogs called Box of Tricks. I highly recommend that you subscribe to the blog. In his post, José describes how he uses an interactive whiteboard to help with the lesson.

If you come up with any cool ways to use Wordle, let us know!

Here's the "word cloud" for my last post on Smartboards and Algebra. See if you can guess what my post is about before you read it.

Thanks José for another great post!

Sharing is Caring!

SMART Boards and Grammar Ninja

I am so excited to about this post. I have found a great application called Grammar Ninja that really works great with the SMART Board interactive whiteboard. One reason this would be a great game to introduce to your students is because it was developed by Greg Lieberman who developed the game as part of High School Independent Study Program in Videogame Design.

You can check out the game by going to Greg's Grammar Ninja website. However, playing the game is not where the real educational value comes in. Greg has also developed a way to add your own sentences to the game by typing in a sentence and then applying the correct parts of speech to each word. I think this is where the real learning takes place. Check out a screen shot of applying the correct parts of speech:

The application that creates new sentences also works great with a SMART Board since you simply drag and drop the correct parts of speech over each word. When you're done, you simply paste the code that's given to you in file on your hard drive.

Here's a video showing how to download and use the Grammar Ninja application. I honestly believe that the best educational use for this would be to let the students create their own Grammar Ninja sentences and then play Grammar Ninja using their sentences. Here is the link to the zip file that contains all of the files you see in the video.

                             

Please share this wonderful application with your Language Arts or ELL instructors. A big thank you to Greg for creating such a fun education tool. Keep up the great work!

Sharing is Caring!