As we head toward the warmer months of the school year, we all know what happens—student attention starts to waver. But, there are strategies and tools that can help keep your students on track. My personal favorite is SMART Notebook 17. I already delivery my lessons through it, and it comes with multiple interactive capabilities that help keep my students focused.

Here are a few helpful SMART Notebook tools that are great for classroom management.

Label Reveal

Label Reveal is an excellent tool for creating interactive activities that focus on locating and defining parts of a model. Labeling exercises inform students of the individual roles each section contributions to the overall function of the model. For example, labeling the different sections of a heart shows how each valve, atrium, and artery help blood move through it.

But label reveal isn’t strictly for the science classroom. Label Reveal can be used for a number of subjects and reasons, including setting guidelines for your classroom space. For my elementary students, I used label reveal to identify each area of the room and define its intended usage along with any behavioral expectations that may be specific to that area of the room.

To do this, create an image that accurately displays the layout of the classroom using images from the Notebook Gallery. Then, in Notebook, click on the SMART Lab button (in the top toolbar of Notebook. Hint, the icon looks like a little monster), and drag the image of the classroom into the label reveal dialogue box where it says “Add Content.” To add the label, select “change style,” click within the image to add a label, add copy, and drag the selected label arrow to the point of the diagram you’d like to label.

For a brief video tutorial on how to use label reveal, watch the below video.

The Gallery and SMART Exchange

There are many useful tools to be found within SMART Notebook’s Gallery. This content may be expanded upon and customized by the user through exploration of the SMART Exchange.

Accessing the Gallery is simple. Click the icon that looks like a landscape on the left-hand side of the page. Once that opens, select the drop-down menu for Gallery Essentials, or search for specific images. You can also access the SMART Exchange by selecting the Earth icon.

There, in the SMART Exchange, you can connect with other educators and “share lessons, ideas, insights and classroom success stories. Resources include teacher- and publisher-created lesson activities, images, videos and more.”

The tools and activities found in the Notebook Gallery and SMART Exchange add interactivity to your lessons, keeping students engaged and excited to learn.

Spinner  

Found within the Gallery, this interactive widget may be used as a random generator, just like the “Random Generator Hat game” found within SMART Lab.

Many teachers love using SMART Lab exercises due to the useful components that may be added for additional classroom management. The ability to add this to any page, with the content of your choosing, provides many opportunities for customized usage of this powerful management tool.

Timer

Anyone who has ever watched a movie where James Bond has 10 seconds to defuse a bomb or has felt the excitement of watching the New Years Ball drop in Times Square knows what kind of excitement and energy a countdown clock adds to an activity.

By adding this gamification tool to your lessons, students competitive drive will increase, as will their desire to engage in the lesson.

Simply search for “timer” in the Gallery search bar, and click the”Interactive and Multimedia” drop-down menu. Add the timer to your notebook page, set the time, and press play! It’s that simple.

Several more mores may be added to the Gallery by taking a visit to the SMART exchange and searching the keyword “ Timer.”

Randomizer

Keep students on their toes with the Randomizer. Also found in the Gallery, the Randomizer offers many uses, but my favorite thing to do with this is add my students’ names and have it randomly select students to increase concentration and participation.

To add this to your Notebook file, search “Random Word Chooser” in the Notebook Gallery, and find it in the “Interactive and Multimedia” drop-down menu.

Adjust the number of words to choose from, choose to have names repeat or not, and reset when you want to start fresh.

For More

For more tips like these, visit our blog at https://34.201.222.12/learning-community/teq-talk/.

Article written by Dan Mineo and Nina Sclafani