SmartBoard!
I have a SmartBoard in my room these days. When we were awash in grant money a few years ago, our site bought three. Two were mounted in classrooms, and we put the third one on wheels (just like the pic in the link) so it could be moved from room to room. The idea was that one would allow people to try out the idea and learn how to incorporate it into actual lessons. Then we might buy more. The reality was that when I got all the software dialed in and all the issues worked out so I could do tech support for the others (about a month), I passed it on to my then-BTSA mentee for his social studies classroom. I figured with all the maps and pics and suchlike, he might be able to use it more fully than I could in English. I mostly just doodled on it. He’s had it ever since.
A week or two ago, he asked me if I wanted it back. He said he hadn’t been using it that much, and he was going in the computer lab for a while, and then…etc. He wasn’t going to use it for the rest of the year. So my servant wheeled it over, and we’ve been doodling ever after.
We finally used the SmartBoard for more than doodling. I copy/pasted a few old sentence scramble exercises into the SmartBoard software. I made each sentence chunk a movable piece, so they could come up to the board, and physically drag the pieces around to show the sentences they’d put together. Since each sentence can go together in more than one way, it’s groovy to move the pieces around to change the rhythm of the sentence. (“Now you’re getting all Shakespearean on me! Nice.”) It’s like those magnetic poetry things, only with sentence pieces. And a few grand worth of equipment.
A lot of them had some trouble with the dragging. Their fingers would bounce and the board would think they had tapped or double-tapped, and a menu would open up, and they would flip.
- Click for full-size.
“AhhhUhhh.”
“Just tap somewhere else, and it’ll go away. You’ll be fine, try it again.”
“OhhhAhhh. What’s that?”
Still, it was pretty groovy, and the kids had fun, and I think I might do it again.
If’n you have a SmartBoard, here’s a copy of the notebook thing.
MadLib for The Giver!
Here’s a new MadLib taken from the pages of The Giver. It’s from chapter 3 when they bring Gabriel home.
The Giver – MadLib #1
1. past tense verb:
2. plural noun:
3. different plural noun:
4. adjective:
5. adjective:
6. present tense verb:
7. adverb:
8. past tense verb:
9. noun:
10. past tense verb:
11. noun:
12. adjective:
13. plural noun:
14. noun:
He had been 1)____________ by the newchild’s 2)_________. 3)________ were 4)___________ in the community; they weren’t 5)__________, but there was no real need of them, and Jonas had simply never bothered to 6)__________ himself very 7)__________ even when he 8)__________ himself in a location where a 9)_________ 10)___________. Now, seeing the newchild and its 11)_________, he was reminded that the 12)_________ 13)___________ were not only a rarity but gave the one who had them a certain look–what was it? 14)_________.
We had a lot of fun with this one.
More MadLibs can be found on the grammar page.
CLICKERS!
CPS clickers have transformed my classroom over the last three years. These days, I rarely grade anything but writing, I have more data about what the kids know and don’t know, and I’m able to move much more quickly in class.
Head on over to Clickers.mrcoward.com to find out how.
Teaching the Outsiders
- BTSN ’10: A New Shtick.Thursday was my 18th Back to School Night here. Some parents have seen my BTSN act a couple of times; I had all five kids from one family, so they got to see the bit a few times. I usually ad-lib most of it–I only have to kill 10 minutes each period–and still usually manage […]
- 8th Grade MaterialEight days in, and I’m still scrambling a little with having an 8th grade prep. The last time I had 8th grade was 7 years ago, and I was scrambling a bit then (the last round of 8th grade had been 11 years before that), plus I got a student teacher for the last third […]
- A Rerun, Just to Keep the Streak Alive.As you may or may not have noticed, I actually have a streak going. After taking most of July and August off, it’s been six days in a row now! My longest run in 2+ years of doing this. So even though it’s getting late, I think I can squeeze in a rerun (from the […]
- Bribery? Maybe. But Who Cares?At our first faculty meeting of the year, before school started, one of the items that came up was funding for our after-school “math lab” aimed at kids who are having “math issues.” (Don’t most all middle-schoolers have math issues? Just saying.) The math teachers were complaining that the kids who get sent there for […]
- E-Reader SurveyI posted earlier this month about reading books on my Palm. I bought several e-books this summer, and I really like being able to carry around a whole buncha books in the palm of my hand (pun intended). So here’s a survey, dear readers. I haven’t used the survey plug-in in quite a while, and […]