Written by James Hollis
This morning I found a great website called Lauri’s ESL Website developed by an educator with 35 years experience teaching ESL. Here name is Lauri Fried-Lee from the City College of San Francisco. Her website contains a wealth of resources and most all of them work great on the SMART Board interactive whiteboard. I was especially impressed with the Listening Activities section of her website.
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.
Literactive1 I normally do not recommend websites where users have to register to access the content since this is often against a school’s UAP. However, the website Literactive offers so many outstanding interactive resources for the SMART Board that it’s hard not to give this website a huge “shout out.”
Magnet1 It’s hard to keep up with all the people talking about The Magnetic Poetry for Kids website. I just spent 40 minutes playing with the various “kits” and now my brain won’t shut off thinking about how many ways this site can be used inside the classroom.
The activities 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.
Sadlier-Oxford Publishing does a great job producing interactive activities in all key subject areas that work great on your Smart Board Interactive Whiteboard.
I review a lot of websites and they really have to be good to make it on my blog. Here’s a resource called The Big Universe: Online Children’s Books that should be a requirement in all schools. Not only does it have an amazing collection of books to read online, it allows students to create and share their own books using very powerful authoring software for kids.
This site is a perfect companion for the SMART Board since you can display the books your students are reading, scroll to any page quickly and easily, take notes, capture items into Notebook, etc. The possibilities are endless.
One of the first things that caught my eye was Tracey’s mentioning of “differentiated instruction.” Since my creative juices were flowing, I thought I would try to develop a Notebook file that can be used on the SMART Board that not only utilized Tracey’s great idea for using Wordle but also had a way for differentiating instruction.
Do you want to be know as “the expert SMART Board user” in your school? Here’s an advanced tip that allows you to turn your finger into a hovering mouse when using the Smartboard interactive whiteboard.
I recently responded to a question on the SMART Exchange Forum in reference to good Spelling resources for your SMARTBoard. Since I found myself playing around with SpellingCity for half an hour, I thought it earned it’s own blog post. The SpellingCity site lets teachers easily create their own spelling lists and then students can practice improving their spelling skills online.