Back to School with SMART Notebook

Start out the school year with a bang!

The newest version of SMART Notebook is out, just in time for the upcoming school year. The latest version – 15.1 – has four new activities in the Lesson Activity Builder. With all your back to school planning afoot, we wanted to give you a jump on a great new activity you can do.

Shout It Out is just one new activity. It allows students to contribute and share ideas in real-time using their personal devices. They can easily share words and pictures. The working space can be segmented, which makes it perfect for brainstorming and categorization exercises.

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Consider giving a couple of these ideas a try with your students:

Ideas for Back to School

• Give your students a voice. Instead of picking one or two kids to share what they did on their vacation break you can now use Shout It Out so all of your students can participate. Students can send pictures of what they did over summer break from their mobile devices to, the SMART Board, and you can lead a whole-class discussion about their images.
• Ask your students to describe the best and worst parts of their school break. Provide two categories and ask them to share some quick thoughts.
• Take suggestions for field trips and where they’d like to go. Categorize their suggestions into museums, parks, zoos, aquariums, and more.

Ideas for Reading

• Find out from your students which books they’d like to read. Divide their recommendations into fiction/non-fiction.
• Read the class a story (or part of one) and before you finish, ask them, “What happens next?” Use the contributions to frame a discussion around the story’s conclusion.
• Ask your students to submit verbs, nouns, and adjectives. Then pick one from each category and have students create “silly” sentences.

Ideas for Setting Goals

• List your goals for the year and ask your students to use their mobile devices to send up this year’s goals to the SMART Board.

Those are just a few ideas to get started for back to school. We bet you can come up with dozens more. Your community of educators would love to hear your ideas – share yours in the comments below.

What are the other new activities in SMART Notebook 15.1? Download the latest version of SMART Notebook to get Shout It Out!, Rank Order, Match ‘Em Up!, and Fill-in-the-Blank. Don’t have SMART Notebook? Get your free trial now!

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About Kristel Gibson

Kristel Gibson is the social media content manager. She’s been studying and responding to the social trends of the “intertubes” for the last eight years. She lives in Seattle with her family.

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