My IWB Dilemma

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Smartboard that is mounted in my classroom. Unfortunately my whiteboard occupies approximately 75% of the dry erase whiteboard board space. Others have complained of this issue too…

If you are a math teacher, you may already know where I am going. My rhetorical question (only because I know that no one with answer) is that… does it matter if students go to the board to display their work?

Hmmm…. my temporary workaround this this issue has been to pass out designated mini-whiteboards and flipping to my document camera to display completed student work on the mini-white boards. Pretty high-tech,eh?

Unifix Suduko & Your Smartboard

 This weekend I picked up a few things from the teacher store in preparation of the 1st day of school. I passed by and ended up picking up this cool Unifix Sudoku game. As you can see, when I got home, I ended up placing the blocks in ROY G. BIV order and numbered the tops to match.

I also created a Smart Notebook file to go with this activity when modelling the activity with my students. This is a great hands-on activity for students of any age that has never played Sudoku. The purpose for placing the numbers on the cubes is for you to create your own puzzles with the help of online resources such as ultra-magnificent logic puzzle site of Vegard Hanssen. I will post later reflecting what the students thought about this game.

SMART Content Creation Seminar (Day 3 – 2/8/09)

Yes… I missed the second day of this workshop due to conflict in scheduling. MathCounts kinda took presidence. However after talking to other participants, they stated that they did the same as they did today, which was to complete the SB notebook lessons from Friday’s training.

The original goal for teachers of completing 10 quality lessons got minimized by the end of the third day. Quality takes time, especially if you are like me – a perfectionist. I won’t bore you with further details, however they gave us their site to share future lessons.

Whiteboard Challenge #1

Yes… I have enrolled myself in the Whiteboard Challenge provided by Jess McCulloch and company. I am going to go through the each of the challenges to see if it is that and if this is a resource that I can refer other teachers to experience rigorous professional development in using their interactive white boards at my school.

WB Challenge #1

I first had to think how could I use recorded sound effectively as a math teacher. I started to create a spelling test, or vocabulary matching review. Boring… However I recalled a Mental math activity that would be most effective using the recorded sound.

I created the mp3 recordings using Audacity and then dragged and dropped the files to the gallery. From there, I placed the individual gallery items into the notebook area as demonstrated above. Then I added text to complete the finishing touches. This activity worked very well with the SmartBoard. I am excited to share this activity with my fellow math teachers. I will later use this activity to create more mental math activities and vocabulary matching quizzes.

-Malik

Notebook file

SmartBoard and Middle Schoolers

[fyi...this repost this from my old blog site]

There is a tremendous growth of SmartBoards and their usage in my school district. I am only discussing this topic at the request of one who heard my blurb on a SmartBoard podcast.

Problem:
Here’s the situation, you are on hall duty and you have your warm-up or some other activity on your SmartBoard. As your students walk in (knowing your rules for entering the classroom) someone has placed their fingers on your board causing you grief and anxiety to reload the warm-up or heaven forbid retype/rewrite it.

Solution:
The Transparent Screen Lock by e-motional.com allows you to lock your screen and still have your PPT or whatever visible to be seen without disturbance! This is the only product that I’ve searched for that allows this feature (since Smart hasn’t figured it out to include it in the Notebook SW). For the full function, it costs about $24….but I believe that it will be a well worth investment.

I guess that would be a benefit of having a Promethean board over a SmartBoard. However, I’m sure those pens will add up if you lose them over time.