MS Word Viewer

On our new teacher computers all Word documents open in Microsoft Word Viewer. You can see this on the top left hand corner of the document.

If you click on the "File" menu and choose "Open for editing" you will be able to work in the document as usual.

Click on this image to enlarge and see the detail.

Display Settings

In order for the SMART Board to display the output from the computer at the optimum setting for the board, the screen resolution must be 1024 by 768 pixels.

Before opening Notebook software, right click on your computer screen and choose Properties on the menu. In Properties, select the Settings tab along the top. Go to Screen resolution and set the resolution at 1024 by 768 pixels, second from the left. Click on Apply, and then click on OK.

You may have to do this every time you start your computer - I really don't know.

Adding themes

It takes up a lot of time to choose a colour and font for every page of a project or unit. That's why Notebook allows you to create a theme. Once you have chosen the colour and font for your theme, you can save it in the "My content" folder and add it to an entire project or unit all at once.

Everyone will love you for being colour coordinated and together. You can create as many themes as you like if you are feeling creative.

I really love Matt Granger and his take on themes.



There is another demo here.

Games for lunch hour

Here are some special games to play that don't require reading knowledge but still teach thinking skills. At pbskids.org, the whiteboard games are quite imaginative. I especially liked Martha, the talking dog and her thinking games. They are called Martha Speaks and they are a ton of fun. On the same page, Elmo Rhymes and Clifford: Puppy dreams are good too.

I would add spellingcity.com as long as the words are kept short and funny. Or try traintracker.

Some kids like to colour in pictures online or connect the dots. These games should generate lots of guessing and discussing first and then trying it out to see it the guess is right. They are at a very easy level, but engaging at the same time.

When did we get our first SMART Board

If you are not familiar with the history of SMART Boards at David Livingstone Elementary School, you might want to see this entry about us in wikipedia,

In 2002, a proposal for the interactive whiteboards was sent to the SmarterKids Foundation in connection with the Connections program. Since then, the interactive SMART Boards started to roll in as 3 were donated to the school in 2003. With extensive consultation with Livingstone's Parent Advisory Group, this elementary school is the first school in BC to have SMART Boards in every K-7 classroom in 2007. As a result, the Vancouver School Board has designated Livingstone as the District Technology Inquiry School in 2008.

Discovery Education

I had a meeting with the representatives from Discovery Education Canada today. This site is part of the Discovery channel and we primarily use it for watching videos that support curriculum. We don't download the video. Instead we just stream the video or portion of from their site and it doesn't take up space on our server. They have just expanded their Canadian service and are actively purchasing more videos with Canadian content.

I didn't realize the other features of Discovery until today. First, our school should be able to set up individual teacher logins rather than the school password that we currently have. Then we will be able to add their videos into a My Content section and keep the videos we like in a very accessible place. Also they also demonstrate the atlas feature that has a map of the world. When you move the mouse over a country, all the videos that they have that about that country are linked on the side. Many applications in a classroom.

We also discovered that they have negotiated an ERAC pricing at $2.00 a student for every school in BC. Well worth it in our opinion. It is very easy to set up a trial password for schools and district who are thinking of video streaming but not sure yet. Discovery is the number one video streaming service in the States.

Survey taking

This math survey at TeacherLed.com is a fantastic example of the math resources you can find at this site. Although it has only four surveys, and is not an application that you can edit, it acts as an excellent demonstration. It is very smooth and easy to use with no preparation. Here is the write-up for this activity.

Conduct a class survey from your interactive whiteboard. Demonstrate the use of tallies and frequency charts. Immediately generate a pie chart and bar chart from your results and compare how useful they are in presenting data. Random data can also be generated.

To create the tally marks, just click in the table cell and the tallies will appear. Click on the x to remove a tally. Choose from the four topics down the left hand side, put in your tally marks and then click to display as a pie chart or bar graph.

I found a Pentomino game designed for the SMART Board on the same site. Browse the sidebar at TeacherLed for more math and spelling resources.

Interactive psychedelic kaleidoscope

The interactive psychedelic kaleidoscope responds to your touch. This site is slow loading on our server but well worth the effort.

Many games and interactive websites are blocked by our server. If you want to use a site in class and find it blocked because it is a game, you can phone the help desk and ask to have the site unblocked.

Orienting the SMART Board

Here is something I didn't know before:

When you orient the board, the cross hairs do not register your initial touch on the board. It is only the point of release that affects the orientation. This means that you can touch the board close to the cross hairs with a pen or your finger, and then drag the pen or finger to the exact spot in the middle of the cross-hairs before you let go or release your touch from the board. This gives a much more precise orientation and should save time in the end.

In other words, the orientation comes from the point where you lift OFF your finger or pen so if you are having trouble aiming for the yellow dot, place the pen near it on the board then (without lifting the pen) move the pen to the yellow dot and then lift off.

If you are not satisfied with the precision of a particular orientation point while orienting, press one of the pen-tray buttons or the left arrow key on your keyboard to redo the previous orientation point.

If you need to review the full process for orienting your SMART board, read this pdf tutorial.

great games for the curriculum

Here are some great games for the primary teaching day.

Interactive Whiteboard Games at pbskids.org

SpellingCity.com

Cash Out - For this game you only have to touch the coins to make change. If you make a mistake, touch the coin again and it will disappear. I wish all life's problems were so simple to solve. This game works best on the easy level because American coins don't look that all different from Canadian ones. See what you think.