Teachers Love SMART Boards

Smartboards and Food and Water Donations

Can using your SMART Board help end hunger? That's an interesting question and the answer is that we call all do our part to help in this world crisis.

However, one organization called FreeRice has a fun website that, along with your SMART Board, involves you in the process of donating food to people in need. 

The FreeRice website tests your knowledge of various subjects including Vocabulary, Grammar, Foreign Language, Geography, Art, Chemistry, and Mathematics.

For every correct answer you get, FreeRice will donate 10 grains of rice on your behalf to the U.N. World Food Program (WFP). 

FreeRice does not make any money from this. "FreeRice is a website committed to the cause of ending hunger around the world. It is run entirely for free and at no profit. All money (100%) raised by the site goes to the UN World Food Program to help feed the hungry. Sponsors make all payments to the UN World Food Program directly"

Another, more dubious, website called FreePoverty claims to donate cups of water on your behalf based on how well you can locate various places on a world map. The website works great on the SMART Board and the kids will love seeing how many cups of water they can donate.

With this being said, I cannot find any legitimate sources that verify that this site is actually donating any water. Despite this fact, it's a fun challenge for the kids and maybe you can use the donation amounts that kids accumulate and create your own donation program within your school.

For example, for every cup of water that the children score, the school will donate 1 cent toward world hunger. The school could run a week-long challenge with the classrooms on who can accumulate more cups of water. At the end of the week, the school makes a donation on behalf of the classrooms that participated. Not only would this be fun and educational, it would help teach children about social responsibility.

Both of these sites offer a unique and engaging way to test your knowledge. I enjoy both sites and I highly recommend them for use in the classroom. You can find out more about both of these website by going to their FAQ (frequently asked questions) page.

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SMART Boards and the Growth of a Nation

I really enjoyed the Growth of a Nation activity from the Animated Atlas website. The presentation takes you through the growth of the United States from 1780 all the way through to the current day.

The website is fully interactive and works great on the Smartboard; it allows you to pause and restart the presentation; it allows you to slide the time line pointer to advance to different time periods, it allows you to click on the states to see more detail; and it even provides a scrollable time line that organizes pertinent data into key topics.

The presentation would make a good starter activity for teachers, and student can use the site as an engaging resource for United States History. In addition, teachers could use the Smart Screen Capture utility to capture various time periods and use the images inside Smart Notebook.

It may be fun to capture images from different time periods and then have students guess what period the image represents. Or, you could build a puzzle of different time periods and then have the students guess what time period the puzzle represents.

Here's a Notebook file containing a puzzle for the period 1840 - 1860. I used the  techniques from my course Notebook Applications - Create a Puzzle to integrate this into Notebook.

The site also has an accompanying video on YouTube which show the expansion of the United States in under one minute. 

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SMART Boards and The Amazing Gigapan of the Inaugural Address

This is my second post talking about Gigapan. Gigapan is a project that incorporates extremely high resolution photographs in a panoramic setting using an innovative method of exploring the image over the Internet.

This site is so easy to use with the SMART Board and it's truly one of the most fascinating sites to learn about the world around us.

One of the newest Gigapan images is a picture of Barack Obama giving his inaugural address to the world. The controls are extremely easy to figure out and use. You can double-click to zoom in; you can use touch and drag to move around; and you can use the controls on the left-hand side of the image to pan and zoom.

In addition, you have individual photographs that were extracted from the original photo. When you click on the photographs, Gigapan will identify the spot on the original image and then zoom to the picture. This is my favorite feature of Gigapan; it's so much fun to watch as the go from picture to picture and Gigapan will zoom out from the old picture and then zoom back in to the new one (see if you can find the invisible man).

Please share this brilliant site!

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SMARTBoards and Placing the U.S. States is a Capital Idea

One of the things I do on this site is pass along great interactive websites when I find them. Lately, I've been getting some great suggestions from the Interactive Whiteboards in the Classroom group on Diigo.

Caroline O'Bannon passed along two outstanding websites for learning and practicing U.S. geography.

The first site is called State Capitals and it allows you to practice identifying the U.S. capitals using a highly engaging interactive site.

The second site is called Place the State and it challenges students to drag and drop states to the correct location on a map of the United States. It even calculates how far off you are.

The Place the States site comes from Sheppard Software and is just one of many great flash applications. This is one of those sites you'll have to bookmark and explore on your own since it has way too many great activities to list here. It appears all the activities work great on your SMART Board interactive whiteboard.

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SMARTBoards and Discovering the New World

In honor of Columbus Day, I thought I would try to locate some useful resources about Christopher Columbus that would be good to use on the SMARTBoard.

In the middle of my search, I checked my Google Reader and found out that Larry Ferlazzo beat me to it. I'm not surprised since Larry beats almost everyone to the punch when it comes to finding the best web resources.

The first three listings on Larry's page are all good resources to use on your SMART Board. The image below has hyperlinks so feel free to click on things directly from here. You can also go to Larry's site if the image below is too hard to read.
 

The Best Online Resources About Christopher Columbus | Larry Ferlazzo's Websites of the Day... via kwout

Thanks for sharing Larry!

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SMARTBoards and Welcome to Our Planet

I used to subscribe to LearningPlanet.com when I was teaching in Arizona a few years back. The kids really had a great time playing Math Mayhem. They liked the educational games so much that I paid for a class subscription out of my own pocket (a common practice among teachers).

I decided to re-visit Learning Planet to see what they were up to. While not much has changed, they do have some fun activities that work great with the SMART Board interactive whiteboard and are free to use. You can click on the pictures below to go directly to the grade level you're interested in.

GRADES PRE K - Kindergarten

My favorite game for Primary is Mr. E's Matching Game.

Notes: All applications in the Primary section work great on the Smartboard except Rats! which requires the use of the keyboard.

GRADES 1 - 3

The best game for grades 1 - 3 is The Counting Game which lets kids practice their skip counting. It's loads of fun!

Note: Spacey Math and Rats! require a keyboard and are not as easy to use with the Smartboard. 

Grades 4 and up

Fraction Frenzy is a lot of fun and gets pretty challenging. Geography Quiz is good practice for learning your U.S. geography.

While Math Mayhem requires a keyboard, it's a lot of fun to play in a computer lab when the kids are looking for something to do.

Note: Math Mayhem, Rats!, and SpaceyMath require the use of a keyboard and are not as easy to use with the Smartboard.

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SMART Boards and GeoSpy

I shared this site with my Twitter friends yesterday. It's called GeoSpy and it's a great way to interact with the world while learning or reviewing continents, countries, states and provinces. I actually used it to brush up on my Canadian Territories and Provinces. I'm happy to report that I can now (after three tries...New Brunswick always gets me) identify all 13 Territories and Provinces (yeah).

Imagine how cool it would be to have your students interacting with your SMART Board, learning about the countries of the world and having fun. Well, GeoSpy is your answer. Another neat feature is the ability to print out a certificate with the student's name on it.

Why not have a group of students (let's say groups of three) practice the states right before class begins. Others students are sure to take interest every day and it would settle the class before your lesson begins. I would also suggest that students use something more precise than their finger when they use GeoSpy with the SMART Board; some of the countries and states are pretty small so make sure your SMART Board is aligned before you play. This game has been SMART Board tested and Hollis approved!

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SMART Board and Travel IQ Challenge

Check out what Danny Nicholson from The Whiteboard Blog found as a replacement for Geosense...

It's the Travel IQ Challenge from Travelpod.com. Since they allow you to embed the game into any website, I'm providing the game on one of my pages so it's free from advertisements. I'm certainly glad Danny got back from his vacation so he could share this. Don't forget to check out his blog as well as his company's website, Think Bank Ltd, that contains all sorts of great resources for your interactive whiteboard.

Here's a screenshot of the game:

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SMART Boards and Geosense

Update: This site is no longer recommended by Teachers Love SMART Boards. One of my very astute readers (Donna) noticed that the game has a chat board that cannot be turned off and appears during game play. If you decide to use this game, please take extra caution.

Here's a great game to play on your SMART Board called Geosense. You can play it alone or against other people. The game tests your knowledge of world geography (or U.S. or Europe) by giving you the name of a city and you have to locate the city on the map. Your score is based on how fast and how close you get to your target.

Thank you, thank you, thank you Cool Cat Teacher for sharing this link on your blog!

Here's a screenshot of Geosense using the World Map:

In this shot, it asked me where Sacramento, USA was located on the map. It took me 5 seconds to guess and I was 240 kilometers off my target (I know, pretty pathetic. You can enlarge the screenshot by clicking on it.)

This site has been SMART Board tested and Hollis approved so enjoy yourself. Once again, thank you Vicki for finding this and sharing this on your wonderful blog!

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