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February 29, 2012
September 06, 2011
SMARTBoard and Thinking Blocks
Sites like Thinking Blocks should be placed front and center on your school's list of Internet resources that work great on your SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard. This site was developed by Colleen King as a way to model Mathematical problems related to Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Fractions, and Ratios.
This site guides students step-by-step through the process of modeling a word problem. The model drawing method is perfect for students aged 8-12 to develop more advanced Mathematical concepts and algebraic reasoning.
Thinking Blocks contains guided instruction videos that do a fantastic job of explaining the modeling process for each type of problem. Once students are familiar with the modeling process, they can go through a more guided instruction. Each section contains multiple types of problems along with an accompanying modeling solution.
Perhaps the best feature is the Modeling Tool where teachers and students can select what area and what type of problem to model. It contains a vast collection of word problems for the students to model, or teachers and students can make their own problem. When the problem is presented, students can use the tools to build their own model based on the problem type.
This site contains much, much more and teachers should spend some time familiarizing themselves with everything this site has to offer.
Please share this incredible site with the other teachers at your school or in your social network.
Sharing Is Caring!
May 19, 2011
SMARTBoard Users - Mangahigh is now FREE
The online, games-based teaching resource, Mangahigh, announced recently that their entire service is available free of charge for all schools in the US, Canada, and the UK.
Mangahigh creates exceptionally high-quality, game-based learning resources to help Primary and Secondary students reinforce their Mathematics skills in a way that is both fun and engaging. In addition to all the great resources, the service includes assessment and analytical tools that enable teachers to monitor the progress of individual students. Best of all, these activities work great on the SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard.
As a certified Mathematics instructor, I believe it's important for teachers to rely on multiple methods of instruction including appropriately developed game-based instruction. This field of education is growing and the quality of the resources is improving all the time.
Providing these resouces free of charge is a fantastic opportunity that you should take advantage of immediately. Please share this information with the other teachers in your school as well as the school principal.
The image above is taken from one of the Primary activities called Flower Power. This is a extremely engaging activity that challenges students to place the flowers in the correct order.
If you want more information about Mangehigh, you can also read my prior blog post which highlights another activity called Transtar.
Sharing Is Caring!
March 30, 2011
November 18, 2010
November 10, 2010
SMARTBoards and Sharing Is Caring - Mathematics
The Mathematics edition of a teacher demonstrating the concept of Sharing Is Caring was a no-brainer. It's Jim Reed's Home Page containing an amazing collection of High School Mathematic resources. Mr. Reed's Math Resource page has been awarded The Teacher's List Top Ten Award.
Not only does Mr. Reed share one of the most incredible collection of online Web Resources, he has personally created an extensive collection of interactive resources that he shares willingly with teachers and students from anywhere in the world.
Mr. Reed is a teacher at a public school in Edmonton, AB called The Argyll Centre. I would like to invite anyone interested in how to model technology use in the school to help students learn to read Argyll's Use of Technology page.
Please Pay It Forward and share this teacher-created resource with your school's Middle School and High School Mathematics teachers. That's the absolute best way to express your belief in...
Sharing Is Caring!
October 06, 2010
SMARTBoard Games and Puzzles from Jefferson Lab
The U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science funds the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility also known as Jefferson Lab. Part of Jefferson Lab's mission is to "serve the nation and its communities through education and public outreach." In connection to that mission, they have developed a wonderful collection of teacher resources dedicated to Math and Science teachers.
The Online Games and Puzzles section contains so many useful interactive resources that you'll want to take some time to explore everything that they have to offer. These activities work great on the SMART Board interactive whiteboard.
Your students will get hooked on the "Who Wants to Win $1,000,000?" game as well as SpeedMath Deluxe. SpeedMath Deluxe presents a Math problem without any operators and the students need to select the correct operations to make the equation true.
Science teachers will love the Element Balancing and the Element Hangman activities and the Element Concentration game is really a great way to let your students have some fun at the SMART Board.
Teachers can use the interactive practice tests and select the number of questions, the type of questions, as well as the specific state standard strand (Virginia).
Please share these wonderful interactive resources with your technology department and the other Math and Science teachers in your school.
Sharing Is Caring!
October 04, 2010
SMARTBoards and Count Us In Games
Pre-K and Kindergarten teachers can use the Count Us In website to play some very engaging Math concept games on their SMART Board interactive whiteboard. Each game is very simple to use and allows students to interact with the information in a fun and engaging manner.
Three of the activities require a keyboard input but the remainder of the games can be played by touching and/or dragging objects to the correct location.
Teachers can also download these activities and run them directly from their local computer. This is a good way to make the activities fit on the entire SMART Board.
Don't forget to share these activities with your fellow teachers. Remember...
Sharing Is Caring!
September 17, 2010
Notebook Activity - Role Model
This is a fun little Notebook activity called "Role Model" that guides the student through a series of short calculations. When the students get their final answer, they use that number to determine their perfect role model.
The fun part is that no matter what number the student starts with, the result will always be the same number - nine. Since you know what the answer will be, you can place "your" name at position 9 to show that "you" are their perfect role model.
Instructions: Before using in the classroom, you will need to edit the text object on the last page and enter your name in the 9th position. To do this, you will need to move the image out of the way and then double-click on the text object that is underneath. After you finish editing the text object, place the image back over the list of names. You may also want to lock your objects when you're done and re-save the file.
You can also change the other names and add additional pictures to the main image to reflect the current trends or personal preferences as long as you don't remove Jennifer Lopez. :o)
If you have difficulties opening the file, please switch to another browser like Firefox or Chrome. Internet Explorer and Safari have difficulties recognizing .notebook files. If you have to use one of these browsers, then save the file to your computer first and make sure the file extension is .notebook and not .zip - if it's not, you'll need to rename the file and change the extension back to .notebook.
Sharing Is Caring!
April 22, 2010
SMARTBoard and Some Sum Fun
That's just about the silliest blog title I've ever used but I'll stick with it since I've been having a lot of fun using a simple little application called Connectsums.
The game is very simple. Students are presented with a target number and they have to select the correct combination of numbers that add up to the target number.
The game has options for using coins, digits, or dice when displaying the numbers and you can play using a timer or a countdown. It's really amazing how well this simple game can improve your ability to count change using coins. Since you're working against a timer, it challenges you to find the best combination to use in order to improve your time. This game is addicting and it definitely helps students recognize summation combinations.
Another fun game that's also available for the iPhone/iTouch is Sumsstacker. This game requires you to drag and drop numbers (coins, digits, or dice) around until you have the correct sum for each column. Once again, this game is very addicting and it doesn't take long for students to start recognizing patterns.
Both of these fun little applications work great on the SMART Board interactive whiteboard.
Sharing Is Caring!
the most effective, affordable, and fun way to learn how to use the SMART Notebook software
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April 19, 2010
Smartboards and Custom Venn Diagrams for Geometry
One of the best critical thinking activities is using a Venn Diagram to organize relationships. However, it can be a challenge for teachers to create custom Venn Diagrams for students to use. With the Shape Sorter Venn Diagram activity, teachers can build their own Venn Diagrams to explore relationships between various geometric objects.
To use the application, select two rules from the pre-defined drop down list of rules. Next, drag the shapes from above into the blue work area. You can use the check button to automatically check whether the shapes are contained in the correct location of the Venn Diagram.
This is an amazing tool for Math teachers to help students understand the different properties of different geometric shapes. The online activity also includes an exploration section to help teachers use the resource more effectively.
I think a great learning opportunity would be to have students divide into groups and use the SMART Board to define their own Venn Diagrams rules and place various shapes on the blue outside area of the diagram. They could then challenge another group to come to the SMARTBoard to complete the Venn Diagram. I think that creating custom Venn Diagrams is actually a better learning experience than completing a Venn Diagram.
This is a flash resource so you can use the Flash Game Maximizer addon if you're using the Firefox browser.
Sharing Is Caring!
the most effective, affordable, and fun way to learn how to use the SMART Notebook software
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March 22, 2010
SMARTBoards and Fraction Interaction
My last blog post highlighted a wonderful site for reviewing procedural methods for solving fraction, decimal, and percent problems. Here are a few other interactive sites that I found that help students understand and communicate using fractional notation. These all work great on an SMART Board.
The first one resource is called Mission Magnetite from PBS Kids Go Cyberchase. This activity is actually categorized as a lesson on percents but I like using the resource when learning about fractions since it represents fractions as both a decimal and as an image. The lesson is simple enough to use and can be used in a myriad of ways by the classroom teacher to help students recognize fractional relationships.
The second resource is called Flitting With Fractions from Learning Media of New Zealand. It's a wonderfully engaging activity that challenges students to select all the butterflies that have a given attribute and place them into a jar. They then have to provide the fractional value of the number of butterflies that are in the jar. Once again, it's a very simple activity but it's very effective.
The last two resources are actually interactive fraction tools that allows the user to visualize fractions of rectangles and circles.
The Circle Fraction tool allows the user to divide a circle into 1-12 sections and then select how many sections are highlighted by touching on the section. I actually use this site a lot since you can easily change colors of the sections and you can control the number of sections. It's a great tool for comparing fractions that have different denominators. I highly recommend using the screen capture tool in Notebook to capture various fractional images.
The Rectangle Fraction tool lets you manipulate various rectangles of the same size to see how they compare to each other when divided into different number of sections. This is a fantastic tool to help students visualize how fractions with different denominators relate to each other.
These sites are definitely worth sharing.
Sharing Is Caring!
the most effective, affordable, and fun way to learn how to use the SMART Notebook software
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March 16, 2010
SMARTBoards and Fractions, Decimals, and Percents, Oh My
Here's a fantastic collection of flash-based activities I found a few days ago. It's called Math Zapper! and it really does a nice job reviewing a number of techniques for working with fractions, decimals, and percents.
I really like that this activity covers the basic standards for computing with fractions, decimals, and percents. It even presents different techniques for solving similar problems.
Since the interactivity is so engaging, it really makes for a nice resource in the Middle School classroom. This would be a great activity to review in class and then have the students review again at home.
Sharing Is Caring!
the most effective, affordable, and fun way to learn how to use the SMART Notebook software
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March 08, 2010
SMARTBoards and Learn Your Tables
This wonderful resource has been making it's way through my Twitter PLN and I thought I should share it here as well since my 9 year old daughter gave it the thumbs up over the weekend.
Learn Your Tables is a flash-based resource that helps students learn their multiplication facts. It provides three types of resources: Drag and Drop, Enter the Answer, and Assessment. You can even select a specific table or you can mix it up and have it provide facts from the 1s through 10s table.
When using the Enter the Answer resource, they provide a keypad so kids can touch the correct answer on the SMART Board - no keyboard required. In addition, the mixed tables Enter the Answer review will provide a quick feedback for each table while you're going through the activity.
Firefox users, you can use the Flash Game Maximizer add-on to make any flash activity full screen. I highly recommend this add-on when using flash-based activities inside the classroom.
Sharing Is Caring!
the most effective, affordable, and fun way to learn how to use the SMART Notebook software
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January 21, 2010
SMARTBoards and Mangahigh Math Games
Okay, I'm hooked.
I'll freely admit that I've been playing Math games on the Mangahigh website for just over an hour now. The games are very engaging and they work great on the SMART Board.
Mangahigh uses game-based learning to help students aged 10-16 learn basic Math skills. A lot of people do not think game-based learning is the best method for instructions. I agree but I also think it can be a highly effective method for supplementing the learning process and increasing motivation for some students.
Let's check out just one of games called TransStar - Journey to the Core which helps students understand Geometric transformations by helping an alien travel through space using Stargates. The game goes through various levels (Sectors) and stages (Zones) using reflections, rotations, enlargements, and translations. It's really nice since you get three tries at each Zone and you get to see the result of your transformation. If you don't align the alien spaceship aligned with the Stargate after three tries, you will need to start over at the last Zone you completed. It's really quite fun.
In the image above, the student needs to avoid the orange arrows and use the rotation orbs to align the space craft in quadrant II to the Stargate in quadrant IV using a counter-clockwise rotation.
This site is a subscription-based service but you do not need to subscribe to play the games. You can actually register your school and do a lot on the site without paying. The pricing model is very expensive, especially if a teacher wants to sign up his/her entire class.
Sharing Is Caring!
December 07, 2009
SMARTBoards and e-Learning for Kids
One of my very first blog posts talked about the non-profit e-learning site called e-Learning for Kids. That was over two years ago! I'm happy to say that this amazing website is still around and is only getting better.
I didn't really say too much about this site on that initial blog post...I didn't need to. It doesn't take long to realize what an amazing resource this is for the SMART Board classroom. The site contains over 100 courses covering Math, Science, Computer Skills, Language Arts, and English.
In addition, the site contains over 50 courses in Health and Life Skills. The courses in this area range from understanding how the body works to understanding things like depression, bullying, and preventing diseases. It is by far the most comprehensive collection of activities for learning and understanding about the human condition.
The age-level for the courses ranges from 4 to 12 years old and the design of almost all the courses was done with Interactive Whiteboards in mind. It is truly a pleasure to see such wonderful educational content on the Internet free of advertising.
Firefox users should look into using the Flash Game Maximizer add-on to help enlarge the flash activities so they fill your entire SMART Board.
Sharing Is Caring!
September 17, 2009
SMARTBoards and Mathsframe
When teachers ask me for interactive SMART Board activities for Mathematics, I always send them to Mathsframe. The activities found on Mathsframe are well designed, engaging, and extremely effective. When you use the activities, you can tell right away that they were designed by an actual teacher.
The wonderful people at Mathsframe are big believers in helping teachers and they provide an incredible library of free resources. They have over 10 activities and each activities has various options and levels to choose from depending on the level of the student.
They also provide schools with an extremely inexpensive site license for their Mathframe Block A - Counting, Partitioning and Calculating which is designed around the Primary Framework Mathematics Block A. The license does not require the Internet and it can be loaded on all the computers in your school. The license provides over 40 activities that cover learning objectives across Key Stage 2 (students aged 7 to 11).
I just read this morning that they've made improvements to their complimentary interactive number line activity and they also added a bunch of new levels.
If you're a Twitter user, you can follow Mathsframe to stay up-to-date on what's going on.
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September 01, 2009
SMARTBoards and Beginning of the Year Surveys
TeacherLED Interactive is definitely one of my favorite sites for interactive resources for the SMART Board. I thought it might be fun to use one of their resources called "Survey Talking" to do some beginning of the year surveys of your students and then have the results be displayed in a either a pie chart or bar graph.
"Conduct a class survey from your interactive whiteboard. Demonstrate the use of tallies and frequency charts. Immediately generate a pie chart and bar chart from your results and compare how useful they are in presenting data. Random data can also be generated."
The "Survey Talking" resource is very easy to use and even has a very easy to follow 3-page instruction document. To begin using the activity, click on the Survey Talking link and then click on the "Go Learning Resources" link.
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August 30, 2009
SMARTBoards and Interactive Multiplication Tables
As my daughter enters the 3rd Grade (8 years old), she'll be working on memorizing her multiplication facts from 0 through 12. My experience as a Mathematics teacher is that memorizing multiplication facts, like it or not, makes life a lot easier in today's Mathematics classroom.
At home, I downloaded Timez Attack for her to practice her facts. She absolutely loves this game and has advanced way past my expectations. At school, I hope her teacher takes advantage of some of the outstanding interactive websites that are dedicated to helping kids learn, understand, and practice their multiplication facts.
Here's a good collection of interactive multiplication review activities for the classroom that work great on the SMART Board.
Multiplication Tables - Interactive Arithmetic ExerciseHelping with Math . com - Multiplication Games (main sites has ads but the activities are great with the SMART Board)
Multiplication.com - The Ants Go Marching...
Please share any other interactive multiplication applications that work great on a SMART Board.
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March 16, 2009
SMART Boards and Fun "Bitesize" Activities from the BBC
I've mentioned the Bitesize activities from the BBC before but wanted to focus specifically on the KS1 (Key Stage 1) activities for children aged 5 to 7.
The KS1 Bitesize area contains both Math and Literacy interactive activities. The Math section contains 12 different activities and the Literacy section has nine. Each activity has three levels of difficulty: Medium, Hard, and Really Hard.
The graphics and audio on these activities are very professional and all the activities were developed with interactive whiteboards in mind so they all work great with the SMART Board. Student feedback is also very stimulating. After students touch on an answer, the activity responds with some fun animation and let's them know if they are correct. In the Kung-Fu Sentences activity (picture below), the character does a spinning Kung-Fu move after students select an answer. If the student is correct, the Kung-Fu Master flips the correct answer into place with his stick. It's pretty cool!
The great thing about these activities is that they can be viewed full-screen to help make the activities more engaging. In addition, each activity has a corresponding worksheet.
Teachers can also access KS2 and KS3 activities from the site.
Please share this wonderful resource with the other teachers in your school. You'll soon be the "go to" person for finding great resources for your SMART Board!
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March 12, 2009
SMART Boards and a Simple Number Line Tool
Sometimes the tools that are the most simple to use are also the most powerful. Case in point, the Decimal Number Lines Tool over at Maths Online is an extremely effective learning tool to use that is also very simple in design and function. It's a perfect companion for the SMART Board.
The Decimal Number Line tool allows teachers to display and interact with a number line. The number line can be moved around and zoomed bigger or smaller. Teachers can decide on which units are displayed and also whether unit marks are displayed. What's really cool is that teachers and students can move an arrow back and forth above the number and when they're ready, they can touch above the arrow to reveal the arrow's location on the number line. The number can be turned off and on just by touching above the arrow.
As a Math teacher, I can think of some great ways to use this with the SMART Board. If you have a good idea, please share it in the comment section.
Since I'm discussing number lines, I should also mention the fun number lines in the eManipulatives section at Houghton Mifflin. They really are a lot of fun for practicing skip counting. They have a very simple skip counting number line for K-2 and they have a slightly more advanced number line for Grades 3 - 6 that has a few more options for the teacher.
Please remember to share these resources with the other teachers in your school!
Sharing is Caring!
March 10, 2009
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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February 11, 2009
SMARTBoards and the Crickweb Flash Resources
I was searching through my past blog posts and I'm quite surprised that I have not written a post about the amazing flash-based resources found on Crickweb. This site contains hundreds of quality interactive resources for
children aged 4 to 11.
For my U.S. readers, the activities are organized into three age groups: The Early Years (age 4 to 5), Key Stage 1 (age 6 to 7), and Key Stage 2 (age 8 to 11). Within each age group the activities are organized by subject area.
The basic subject areas include Math, Science, History, and Literacy. However, there are also activites for Geography, Religion Education, French, Spanish, and even Design & Technology. (Please note that since this site is from the UK, the money activities use British Currency. However, teachers from other areas should still explore these activities.)
The resources contained on this site are all interactive and very few of them require keyboard input. Best of all, all of the activities work great on the SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard since most of the activities only require students to touch or drag objects. (If you would like to download and use the Promethean Flipchart files that are available, you can import these using Notebook. Just open Notebook, select "import" from the file menu, change the file type to "All Promethean Files.")
I've included a few screen shots but the best way to find what your looking for is to browse around and play with the activities. I can promise you that you'll find something fun and exciting for your classroom!
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February 10, 2009
SMART Boards and Custom Resources for Algebra Two
Recently, someone shared a link (thanks Amy!) to some great Algebra Two (Holt, Rinehart & Winston) resources created by a teacher named Thomas Vizza. This site presents a wonderful example of how to start moving toward a "student-centered" learning environment where a teacher's primary focus is on creating the resources and environments that help students learn more effectively.
Mr. Vizza has created a collection of Smart Notebook files to support various chapters of the Algebra Two text book. In addition, he's made available an amazing library of Mathematical Notebook Galleries containing images, pages, and even a few flash animations! My favorite one is definitely the Formula Gallery. The image on the right is displaying the Quadratic Equations folder in the Algebra section of this Gallery. Notice how well organized this is and how well he labeled all the objects!
Also, if you're a teacher looking for an example of what to do when you can't make it to class, then check out his lesson plan for Graphing Quadratics he left for the substitute teacher. Totally awesome!
Mr. Vizza's website contains much more than I'm describing here. Even if you're not a Math teacher, I highly recommend browsing around the website to help get some ideas of how you can set up your own class resource center. Building this type of resource library not only helps students learn it also helps teachers facilitate learning more effectively.
Oh, I almost forget, Mr. Vizza also has a collection of other websites that he recommends. I'll also go ahead and put a few of my favorite links here so they're handy:
While I'm at it, here's another Notebook Gallery (shared by my friend Obe Hostetter) containing 60 Mathematical symbols. It's definitely a must have.
Please share this post with your High School Mathematics teachers!
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February 03, 2009
SMARTBoards and Painting Your Way to Success
I was playing around with the ArtPad from art.com and I find it a totally engaging experience. I love watching the playback of how someone else draws or paints. This site does a really good job allowing you to control playback of your own design or a design already contained in the gallery. The site is so simple to use and it works great on the Smart Board.
This site has obvious uses in an art class but can also add a lot of engagement to an otherwise stagnant lesson.
For example, teachers or students could solve math problems and then decorate the solution for a little artistic touch.
Teachers could have a review lesson called "Painting Your Way to Success" where students get to come to the SMART Board and solve a Math problem. If they solve the problem correctly, they get to spend time decorating it and signing it as long as they don't cover the answer. Teachers could then post the links to the finished art work for students and parents to review. How excited do you think students would be if their Math art work was featured on the Internet and shared by the teacher?!! If you click on the picture above, you can see it being created in artPad. You may want to adjust the speed of the playback.
Please share your ideas for using this site in the classroom!
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