Anyone can create great looking books. While a lot of the focus has been on textbook creation, iBooks Author can be used by students as well. We’ve created a few examples of what students might do as class projects. There’s a look at Cells, Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Boston and its role in American History.

Student created books fall under the writing strand of the Common Core ELA Standards.  It’s standard W.X.6, which generally states “use technology to produce and publish writing” and varies only slightly by grade level.  A project whose goal is to produce a published book would cover more than a few of the “production and distribution of writing” standards.

How do you see students using iBooks Author in your classrooms?

The site is user-friendly and allows students to develop a free 30-second screen show using text, images and music. Then, Animoto will whip up a unique web production that can be shared via email or even Facebook.

Here are some examples: Flat Stanley photo story and a review activity for Living Environment students.

The questions are both multiple choice and free response, and have feedback or rubrics built into each activity.

You can also link these lessons and activities to SMART Notebook, or you can download and embed them using your browser. The following links will give you the options for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome:

• Download Flash Objects in Internet Explorer using Excite
• Download Flash using Firefox
• Download Flash using Google Chrome

A Google a Day is a daily search puzzle that can be solved using creativity and clever search skills on Google. Using Google to find the answer is not only allowed, it’s encouraged. A new question is posted everyday on agoogleaday.com and printed weekdays above the New York Times crossword puzzle. Each day’s puzzle offers search tips and features used to solve the question. These questions are challenging in that they require the right questions be asked to find the solution…inherently teaching great search tips and enhancing creative thinking and research skills.

To prevent spoilers from appearing as you search the web, A Google A Day uses a special version of Google, called Deja Google. Deja Google is a wormhole inspired time machine that searches the Internet as it existed before the game began.  This way, someone’s recent blog post about finding the answer won’t spoil the fun.

Introduce agoogleaday.com to your students, and watch as they accept the challenge to become more savvy researchers!

You can clone:

1. A single page within a Notebook file
2. A single page to another Notebook file
3. Multiple pages to another Notebook file
4. Multiple pages within a single Notebook file

To clone a single page, simply type Ctrl-D or select the page in the Page Sorter tab and choose “clone” in the drop-down menu. To copy that page to other Notebook files, simply select the desired page from the Page Sorter tab and drag it to the target file.

To copy multiple Notebook pages to another file, you must start from the Edit Groups window. Click on “Groups” at the top of the Page Sorter and choose “Edit Groups” from the bottom of the drop-down menu (in the new Notebook v10.8, you can do this from any group heading). Select your desired pages and drag them to the target file. You can place them on the main window or into the Page Sorter of the target file.

To clone multiple pages within a single Notebook file, select “pages” in the Edit Groups window and place your pages in the Page Sorter window.  Then, simply drop them into your desired location.

Check out our Products page to learn more about each member of the SMART Response family of products: http://www.teq.com/smart-response

You can also use the hardware to create and deliver questions through the SMART Notebook software. Although some find the process of typing out questions time consuming, there’s a great new feature that will enable you to create an Answer Key. This will allow you to program each Notebook page with a particular Question Type (Multiple Choice, T/F, Numeric, etc.) and set the correct answer in a few simple steps.

Watch this video to see how it works:
You can pass out hard-copies of the assessment or have students open a workbook and use their clickers to submit answers at their own pace.

Visit our Resource page to install the latest version of the SMART Response and Notebook software: http://www.teq.com/resources

The Land Problem (From Connected Math)

The link to the right is a dynamic worksheet created with Geogebra software. It’s based on a problem called “Making a Map” from Connected Math, and is a terrific accompaniment to this Word Document, from the 1998 NCTM Yearbook.

Fractions (From Primary National Strategy)

This Interactive Teaching Program is useful for teaching fractions, equivalent forms and even the logic behind common denominator algorithms.

Below is an interactive mathematics video that focuses on addition and subtraction of fractions with common denominators.

Fraction ITP from Matt Ringh on Vimeo.

The Random Number Generator will make class time more efficient and increase student engagement—their number could come up any second!

Tutorial on Random Number Generator

The following video is a tutorial of the Random Word Chooser in action.