Written by James Hollis
If you’re looking to spice up your Math class with an interactive and engaging way to create graphs, you may want to pop over to the new Chartle.net website. Their tagline is, “simple & interactive charts online.” After experimenting (playing) for over an hour creating various types of charts, I absolutely agree with their tagline. […]
Twittericon I’m following some great people on Twitter who seem to understand the concept of “Sharing is Caring!”
Here are five great web resources that work great on the SMART Board. I discovered all of these on Twitter and passed them along (retweet) to the people who follow me.
After the flash contents loads, it will display an underwater simulation containing various types of fish and other creatures. When viewing this on your SMART Board, you can set it so you can touch and drag your finger around the SMART Board to investigate the landscape or you can set it so it follows a particular fish as it swims around. The main character in this underwater adventure is definitely the shark and it’s a lot of fun having the application follow it around as it explores the reef.
After you enter a keyword or tag, Tag Galaxy displays a big planet that is being orbited by other potential tag planets. Click (or touch) one of the orbiting planets to refine your image search. When you’re finished adding tags (planets), you can click on the big planet and it will display photos from Flickr that match your selection. You can then rotate the planet to view the different images that match your tags. When you find a picture you like, you can click on it to enlarge it.
Here’s an great interactive keyboard application that was shared by one of my readers. It’s a Virtual keyboard from the Birmingham Grid for Learning that can simulate nine different instruments (my favorite is definitely the electric guitar) and can even play back chords. It’s a perfect companion for the SMART Board.
The BBC’s One Minute Wonders video learning site is a perfect example of an educational website that’s designed to be engaging for children while providing outstanding educational content for the classroom.
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.”
I’m starting to see a barrage of media articles about schools using SMART Boards in the classroom. It’s no surprise that they all seem to mention how much more engaged the students become when teachers use the SMART Board effectively.
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.
One group of Web 2.0 applications that are a lot of fun to use are paint applications. These applications allow you to draw, sketch, and paint using various paint tools. Most of these work great on the SMART Board interactive whiteboard but not all of them allow you to save your work to your computer’s hard drive.