Artful, Tuneful, Beatful

This is something I have wished for basically every time i use a SMART Board file in my room. I always try to let as many kids have turns as possible, and I almost always have another class coming to do the same activity right after the last one.  I NEED a button to push that resets my pages back to their original state easily! Closing and reopening the file is just inconvenient, especially if you slip and save changes!

Click here to see a video tutorial on how to add reset buttons to Notebook pages.  Thanks to @jameshollis on Twitter for sharing the page with me!

I am sad to have been away from my blog for so long!! We have had a lot going on at school including a round of layoffs (I was spared, my division is trying hard to maintain fine arts positions which is a blessing in so many ways) an a week’s worth of screening for incoming preschoolers (we use the Speed DIAL test and we ALL have to help do it!)  As a result of the screening we gave a “performance” tonight even though we haven’t had music class since week before last!!  It was rather stressful but I keep things VERY simple for my little pre-K’s anyway so we all came through alive!!

Because of the screening we had to delay our celebration of Dr Seuss’s birthday until Friday of this week (we let the kids wear PJ’s an it just didn’t seem like a good idea with the schedule all messed up and a bunch of visitors in the building!) I am looking forward to sharing some of the SMART Notebook files I just found on the SMART Board Revolution Ning with our classroom teachers!

http://smartboardrevolution.ning.com/group/prekkindergarten1st2ndgrade/forum/topics/dr-seuss-notebook-lessons

If you have a SMART board (or other IWB, as often you can import files) I recommend the SMART board revolution Ning heartily!!

As I was looking through the IWB Challenge I happened across the SMART Notebook Lesson and Activity Toolkit.  This is a downloadable set of gallery items which DRAMATICALLY expand the functionality of your SMART Notebooks.  There is an activity for playing a memory-style tile game, matching, sorting and all kinds of activities that provide instant feedback on right or wrong answers to your students.  I still wish SMARTTech would get on board with something as simple and useful as Promethean’s containers, but I am really excited about the possibilities provided by the Lesson and Activity Toolkit.

I’m also embarrassed to admit I only JUST figured out that I can add my own objects to the gallery.  It’s too bad it took me so long to catch on, but just think how much easier my life just got!

As a result of some talk on the teachers.net music forum I have started a wiki for music teachers to share SMART Notebooks and other digital creations they use in the classroom.  It seems that SMART Boards are becoming particularly popular in music classroom (where the financial investment makes sense, since the music classroom typically serves every student in a school) and many of us are reinventing the wheel by creating lesson materials our colleagues around the country have already produced.  This wiki is intended to be a place to share with each other in order to make all of our lives easier and all of our teaching more effective and efficient.

The wiki is still in the early stages but we have already had some TERRIFIC contributions.  If you would like to contribute please get in touch with me so I can put you on the list!

mustech.pbwiki.com