SMART Board Goodies A Resource Blog by Amber Coggin 

Give your students a thrill for April Fools’ Day by letting this “Magic Gopher” guess their number after doing some simple math. I’ve done it about four times now and he’s guessed right every time! Have fun!

I stumbled upon GrabbaBeast.com today while browsing Delicious. It’s an awesome interactive website where you can build your own beast using a variety of body parts. You can even paint the beast any color you’d like by using the paint tool. Once completed, you can save it, send it as an ecard, download it as wallpaper, or share it with friends on a variety of social sites. You will even be given a bit.ly url to your beast, as well as an embed code so you can put it on any website or blog. You don’t have to register or log in to do any of these things; however, you will have to name your beast and add your nickname. How awesome would this site be to use for the Monster Exchange or any similar project? Your students are going to love this!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Here is a fun game called Lucky Clover to play on the SMART Board today.The object is to find, by touching/clicking, all 10 four leaf clovers as quickly as possible.  Let the students take turns to see who gets the best score. Tip: There are lots of distractions on the site around this game. I tried using the Flash Game Maximizer extension in Firefox but it didn’t seem to work properly. Another suggestion would be to use the screen shade or spotlight tool to highlight just the game area. Have fun!

I originally found this wonderful collection of whiteboard resources while browsing some Delicious bookmarks. Then it led me to a post made yesterday on EdGalaxy.com. These resources were compiled by Philip Crammond, and they include some I’ve never seen before. Please browse this fabulous resource! You will find many things that you can use.

Here are two of my favorites:

Letter Formation Writing Repeater- “Write your letter or hand writing pattern, save them and replay them on an IWB. For slow playback you will need to write the word slowly!”

Class Minder: “A digital assistant that keeps an eye on your class on those rare occasions when you have to pop out.” This is hilarious! Give your students a laugh. The “assistant” moves his eyes and makes different facial expressions.