At their best, interactive whiteboards can get students out of their seats to lead their own learning. But, like all technology, the boards are only as good as the people using them. And the people using them are only as good as their training.

I think the article does a good job covering three very important landmarks in using the Interactive SMART Board:

1. Identify Your Early Adaptors

2. Make The Content Relevant

3. Know The Goal

The article also lists some great places for Professional Development including Teacher Online Training. The Notebook Gallery also provided Professional Development as well as Ready-made resources for your SMART Board.

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This activity is available free of charge on The Notebook Gallery website. It’s a perfect activity for the last few days of school before Winter Break begins.

If you like this activity, please feel free to explore The Notebook Gallery site for other amazing Notebook lessons.

As a free member, you can purchase any activity on the site for less than two bucks (compare this to activities that cost $4.99 – $24.99 on the Smart Exchange website).

As a Premium Member (only *$3.95 per month), you can get unlimited access to all Notebook resources as well as video tutorials and step-by-step video instructions for creating your own Notebook activities.

Sign up Now! You’ll be glad you did.

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This file contains two versions depending on whether you have Notebook 10 or Notebook 11 installed on your classroom computer.

To use the attendance activity, students drag their names from the student list into one of the Winter ornaments. After all the students have moved their names, it’s very easy for the teacher to see which students are absent.

Click To Enlarge

The Notebook 11 version uses the Activity Builder feature to center the student names and play a chime sound so students know they have successfully taken their own attendance.

If you are a Premium Member of The Notebook Gallery, you can also submit your students names and receive a custom Winter Attendance file for your classroom.

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• SMART Lesson Activity Builder support – View, interact with and reset activities that were created in the full version of SMART Notebook software on a computer.

• New Lines tool – Insert a line and change its color and thickness.

• New object properties – Double-tap or tap and hold to lock and unlock an object or to change the order of an object.

• More pen properties – Change the color and thickness of the pen.

• More system compatibility – Supports iOS 6 in addition to iOS 5.

Likes:

I like the ability to change pen thickness and the new line tool is a welcome and necessary addition.

I was successfully able to change the order of objects and I could easily lock and unlock objects. This was a critical update that I’m very happy to see implemented.

Dislikes:

I have to say that I’m very disappointed with this update. Perhaps SMART needs some outside eyes to test the application before releasing it. The most exciting new feature is the support for the Activity Builder Add-On. Unfortunately, this new feature did not work on my iPad running OS 6 or on my iPad running OS 5.

The biggest concerns I have deal mainly with the text tool. The problems I encountered also varied depending on which version of the iPad operating system I used.

When adding text in the lower half of the page, the page did not move up so I could see the text object when I was typing (OS 5 only)

When adding text and touching inside the text object to begin typing, the keyboard appeared but I had to touch inside the text object again to add text (OS 6 only)

The performance issues when editing text are extreme and make editing text a nightmare.

Summary:

The addition of the line tool, the pen thickness feature, and the ability to control locking and ordering are a welcome and necessary addition.

The problems with the Activity Builder support and the added problems with the text tool reasons enough not to update the app at this time.

The app still does not allow saving to online storage sites like Dropbox and Box.net.

Page display and sizing is problematic and moving from one page to another is much too slow.

The app does a very poor job of handling larger files. The poor performance when working with larger files makes the app unusable.

Final Note:

I’m still confident that this app will become a useful tool but SMART needs to focus on current performance problems if they want to make this a useful app for the classroom. The app is a little too pricey to purchase at this time and I would wait for the next update before updating to the current version.

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The Notebook Gallery has additional free Halloween resources including The Prime Of Life prime number activity, the Halloween Word Search Puzzles, and the Halloween Jokes activity.

Membership to The Notebook Gallery website is free and includes access to the Free Resource section, two free download credits, and the ability to purchase any Notebook resource for an extremely low price.

Premium Membership to the Notebook Gallery is only $3.95* per month

Premium Membership to the Notebook Gallery includes unlimited downloads of any Notebook resource, unlimited access to all video learning activities, full access to the Notebook Video Tutorial library, toll-free support, and the ability to request custom Notebook lessons for your classroom. Satisfaction Guaranteed or your money back.

It doesn’t take long to realize that the Notebook lessons and templates contained in The Notebook Gallery are second-to-none and the Notebook Guided Learning Activities are by far the most effective way to learn how to use the Notebook software.

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Halloween Clip Art

(updated) I have compiled an extensive collection of Halloween-related clip art so you don’t have to spend time looking all over the Internet.

Games

Hangman – Fun graphics, more advanced word list. (3 stars)

Halloween Hangman – Good, simple hangman game for Halloween (3 stars)

Halloween Pairs Game – Zoomable and very easy to use (4 stars)

Stacking Pumpkins Game – Might be a fun way to reward your students (3 stars)

Halloween Math Games for K-6 – Great games courtesy of the Oswego City School District

PBS Kids Halloween Collection – Lots of games and activities from PBS Kids.

Spelloween - Practice your spelling by identifying correctly and incorrectly spelled words. You may want to bypass the part that asks you to type the word correctly since this is difficult to do on the SMART Board (middle / high).

Frankenbrain – Find the brain if you dare! (primary / middle)

Halloween, Halloween, What do You See? – Primary reading activity based on the famous book series (primary)

Jigsaw Puzzles

Animated Bat Jigsaw Puzzle – Fun
puzzle. Works great on the SMART Board

Advertising on this site is quite distracting. Please review before using in the classroom. (4 stars)

Bat Jigsaw Puzzle – Another bat
jigsaw puzzle created from Jigzone (3 stars)

Halloween Jigsaw Puzzle – More
good puzzles created from Jigzone (3 stars)

Another Halloween Jigsaw Puzzle -
More good puzzles from Jigzone (3 stars)

Informational Activities

Halloween Safety Game – Fun game
to play to educate your students about trick-or-treating (4 stars)

Interactive Halloween History Quiz – Nice game from the BBC (middle)

History Channel’s History of Halloween – Some nice resources including videos and slideshows. (all grades)

5 Minute English – ESL History of Halloween includes vocabulary with an online Halloween quiz.

Create Your Own Activities

A Horror Movie – Create your story by picking words. You’ll have to type in the words. (3 stars)

Creepy Coloring – Have fun coloring in a pumpkin (primary).

Monster Band – Create your own band! This is a flash file that can also be inserted into Notebook.

Notebook Resources

Halloween Jokes – A Notebook file containing 10 different Halloween jokes. Lots of fun for the kids.

Wizard Spell Ordering Numbers – Have the Wizard conjure up five numbers and then use a counter-spell and place the numbers into the correct order. (Shared by Peggy DuBose)

Halloween Word Search Riddles – Contains three fun word search puzzles containing Halloween-related vocabulary words.

Halloween Ghost Countdown – Keep track of correct answers using this fun Notebook countdown that announces a winner after five correct answers. Simple but fun. (4 stars)

Halloween Random Number – Generate a random number and student say whether it is less than, equal to, or greater than the late great Lucius Creven who died at the age of a hundred seven.

Bonus Video Tutorial: Learn how to customize the Random Number Generator to create a custom activity.

Halloween Sound Files

All the sound files below are in mp3 format and can be imported in Smart Notebook

Ghoul Laugh

Evil Laugh

Monster Mash (song)

Monster Snarling

Monster Cry

Next Time (fun & scary negative feedback)

Real Heart Beat

Screaming Female

Thunderbolt

Tortured Person Screaming

Werewolf Howl

Witch Cackle

Woman Scream

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I discovered the Textivate resource on Danny Nicholson’s The Whiteboard Blog. He does a great job describing Textivate and he even provides a great example for reinforcing/reviewing the process of evaporation. I’ll let you read more about Textivate from Danny’s post. This will also give you a change to become more familiar with his great blog.

Being a math teacher, the first thing I did with Textivate was to create an interactive review for the order of operation. Since I registered on the site (free of charge) I was able to save my Textivate to share with others. Below is the actual Textivate I created – this is a live activity so go ahead and drag the tiles and place them in the correct order.

Here is the link to the original text entry. From here you can look at all the available options for creating different types of activities. I created mine to work specifically with the Paragraph option.

Remember, for a more detailed description of Textivate, head over to Danny’s post on The Whiteboard Blog.

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To make the word search puzzles more exciting, each one has a riddle to solve. To solve the riddle, students need to highlight all the words in the puzzle using the Highlighter Pen. The answer to the riddle can be found by putting together the first series of unused letters at the top of the puzzle.

You can download this file, as well as other Halloween-related activities for your classroom, from the Free Resource section of The Notebook Gallery website.

The Notebook Gallery has other high-quality and engaging Halloween-related activities for your classroom. These activities are available as a Premium Member (only $3.95* per month) or you can purchase them individually (all for under $2). You can also use one of your two free download credits that you get when you sign up for Basic (free) Membership.

The Notebook Gallery’s Halloween-themed resources alone are worth more than the entire cost of a Premium Membership.

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I do not recommend copying and pasting the images into Notebook. It is better if you save the file to your computer first and then use the Insert Menu in Notebook to bring in your image.

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You can download this file from the Free Resource Section of The Notebook Gallery.

Don’t forget to take a look at all the Halloween-related activities on The Notebook Gallery including the Before And After activity that was just added today. Before And After is for early Primary grades and it’s an extremely fun way to learn and practice ordering single digit numbers. It has a Halloween theme, it’s interactive, and it has some amazing animation. Your kids will love it!

Don’t forget, Basic Membership on The Notebook Gallery is free and you can download any of the resources in the Free Resource section and you get two download credits to download any Notebook file resource you find on the site. In addition, all Notebook file resources on the site are available for purchase. What’s great about this is that these are some of the most amazing Notebook activities you’ll ever use in the classroom and they’re all priced under two bucks! We do this so you’ll see how amazing this site is for teachers who love SMART Boards and you’ll consider becoming a Premium Member for only $3.95* per month.

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