Chanatown

I've made it a goal to get more involved with lesson development using SMART Notebook with ETHS teachers that have the interactive whiteboards in their classroom. Several faculty members have taken me up on my offer to help plan, design, and implement Notebook lessons for their curriculum, and I'll be sharing our products here, though you can find all of the links with descriptions on  my website  or on  SMART Exchange . In Similar Polygons , we wanted to reinforce ratios and setting up proportions from word problems. I used the drag/drop capability to encourage students to see where the numbers were coming from when creating a proportion. We then used some of the measuring tools to discuss what makes two figures similar. Finally, we used drag/drop to label geometric figures and coupled with setting up proportions in traditional problems. For the lesson on Substitution , we had students drag values into variables, thus putting a hands-on approach to substitution. W...

I've made it a goal to get more involved with lesson development using SMART Notebook with ETHS teachers that have the interactive whiteboards in their classroom. Several faculty members have taken me up on my offer to help plan, design, and implement Notebook lessons for their curriculum, and I'll be sharing our products here, though you can download the actual files from my website or on SMART Exchange . The first lesson collaboration stemmed from a task to create something that would make reviewing for final exams a bit more engaging. I chose a Tic-Tac-Toe review game as the foundation, and the lesson featured nine review problems from an early unit in Geometry. To take advantage of the SMARTBoard's interactive features, I had students drag and drop equation elements to label a figure (an important part for starting math problems) and then to setup an equation (the next critical step). Students then use inking to solve the problem. The lesson was received well in ...

Although the software has been released for a few months, we are just getting a few new boards installed and I have had a chance to explore more of the new features found in SMART Notebook 10.7. So, here are some observations from the update as well as how the new features integrate nicely with the 800 series board.

Yesterday, I gave an afternoon training workshop on the Lesson Activity Toolkit for Smart Notebook.  Similar to what I've seen other trainers do, I view the LAT as the second phase in teacher training for SmartBoards.  The first phase involves simply using the board for everyday usage (e.g. web browsing, showing videos, presentations).  The next half step would be to start using the Notebook software to ink and possibly add images and pre-built flash animations from the Gallery. In planning for this workshop, I was hoping to find training resources that described all of the features of the Lesson Activity Toolkit.  Unfortunately, though I found a few useful blogs, ( Teq , The WhiteBoard Blog ) and some individual YouTube videos, I didn't find a nice summary of the features and possible integration strategies for the classroom.  Thus, I created a handout and my first wikispace .  The handout (found as an attachment on the wiki) contains a summary of the bu...