Arts Education

Almost a year ago, SMART Notebook was updated to version 15, bringing with it a new feature called Lesson Activity Builder (LAB) . This addition allows teachers to create engaging, interactive activities for students. Options include flipping cards, filling in blanks, ranking and sorting things. Many of the activities also include a gaming component - random spinning wheel or hat pick, dice, and so on. In August, Notebook 15 was updated to include a LAB called Shout It Out that allows students to use devices, mobile or otherwise, to interact with a Notebook file. I tried this out yesterday in class. Step one was to use the LAB to create categories in the SMART Notebook file. I planned to use this feature just to see the answers my students calculated to the homework due in class, so I just made each question into a category. It is very easy to follow the on-screen prompts and click through some options (themes, game components) to create the Shout It Out. Step two was to start the ac...

In January I participated in a web chat with Laura Litton from ClassKick . ClassKick is an iOS app that allows a teacher to create an assignment of slides and then watch students complete them in real time. While students work, they can raise a virtual hand to get help or their work checked. I love that students can help each other within the app. Stickers are available for instant feedback. Students can go back to their work (or parents and others could watch a student work) with a new web viewer. I have written about ClassKick a couple of times before and every time I use it I like it even more. When I spoke with Laura last month, she mentioned that some teachers are using it to differentiate instruction and I asked for more details about that. She said some teachers create different assignments and provide the codes for those assignments to different groups of students. Other teachers create multiple page assignments and give students a menu of pages to try out. I thought both t...

In January I wrote about how much I enjoyed using the iOS IPEVO Whiteboard app with my students to make videos of chemistry demonstrations . I promised to share some of the best of these easy to make and annotate videos. Around the same time of that post, I read about ClipChoose , a webtool for making video polls, so I decided to share the videos using ClipChoose. ClipChoose is a free service for creating polls based on videos. It's very easy to use. Create a quick free account to make your first poll. Then write a question and paste in the YouTube URLs of the videos you want to use in your poll. Click Submit Poll to get the link for your poll. It couldn't be simpler! Want to see my student videos and participate in a poll about which video is best? Click here . ClipChoose was probably not made for education, but I can see a lot of uses for it, especially when paired with the easy IPEVO Whiteboard app. Ask students to make videos that show them solving problems and create a po...

A few weeks ago I wrote about a new approach I tried to teaching stoichiometry , the fundamental math of chemistry. At almost the same time, I wrote a post in response to a blogging initiative launched by the MathTwitterBlogoSphere (#MTBoS). This post is a follow-up to both of those things. This week the #MTBoS asks us to post about a lesson we taught this week. What went well? What didn't?  The Lesson This week I taught a lesson that is part of a progression of stoichiometry lessons. In the past, I might have stood at the board and prodded my students with questions to help them lead me to the answer using a problem solving strategy that we have practiced all year. In the past couple of years, I made a presentation available to all students and they could use it (or not) to assist them as they worked through the problems while I circulated to help and answer questions. I wanted to try something slightly more differentiated and targeted this year, partly because my experiment in...