Google Documents and SMART Notebook Tips

Tom Barrett has been working on a SMART Notebook tips presentation, but the difference here is that he has allowed many of us to contribute with ideas, tips and ultimately our own slides.

I am very excited by this creative use of Google Docs as a truly collaborative tool. So far there are 18 tips, the latest comes from yours truly (unless Tom chooses to delete this slide). This presentation is well worth a look and you will almost certainly find something useful!

I am still pondering the fine detail of how I would use this tool in the classroom and I know Tom has had mixed success, favouring Google spreadsheets over the presentations application, due to the speed of the data updating. Nevertheless I am going to be promoting and employing these tools in my teaching in 2008 as a different way of doing multimedia and spreadsheets in upper Key Stage 2.

SMART Jigsaw- New Tools

Great news for SMART BOARD users. SMART have released a lesson activity toolkit to aid teachers in preparing notebooks. This is only in beta format at the moment and there are one or two glitches, which I am sure will be overcome. But these aside there are some fantastic tools here, tools which make the job of SMART board creation even easier and build on the flash resources which the board currently ships with.





Download the Beta and offer feedback@ http://education.smarttech.com/ste/en-US/Ed+Resource/Software+Resources/toolkit/

Here are a few example screenshots



Word list tool- click on the frog or other icon to reveal a word list- e.g. spellings of the week



Teachers notes- why not put these at the beginning of a notebook to explain the learning objective for future reference



Match the clues to the words- great for science and maths vocab reinforcement


Multiple choice questions - millionaire style

SMART BOARD SPLIT

I was pleased to read in Simon's blog, how he has recently learned to open two windows and drag pictures from one to the other. This is an example of a technique that may seem obvious and old hat to some but is a wonderful and time saving find for those who have just discovered it!

Here are a couple of new finds on the SMART BOARD I recently came across:

• Hold down both on board "buttons" on the board to bring up the calibration screen


• When googling or using a search box- write the item you are looking for anywhere on screen e.g."human dalek"- then place your pen in the search box - the menu will appear to recognise

And finally by going to view- zoom and dual page display you can effectively split the screen between two pages in a single notebook- a great tool for literacy work. Note I needed the very latest version of SMART notebook to do this.