15 Ways to use a SMART Slate/Airliner in the Classroom

Perfect practice will make for perfect use. You must practice using the Airliner with and without your students to get used to the functionality. I also highly recommend that you spend a 10-15 minutes a day examining the SMART Notebook software to get a feel for all that it can do.

A wireless Slate/Airliner allows you to be more mobile in your classroom. Take advantage of this mobility by walking around the room and turning individual work into group work and allowing more interaction among students when working on assignments.

1.)Create or Scan the worksheet that students will be working on. Instead of verbally asking students the answer when going over the worksheet, have students use the Airliner to write in the correct answer in the blank spaces. Same goes if filling in a Venn-Diagram or other chart. The same goes for if you are using a Document Camera

2.)Use the Airliner to highlight notes from a PowerPoint Presentation, or underline critical vocabulary within the presentation. Make students more aware of the most important points in a slide.

3.) Use it to circle or highlight an area of a picture or movie that you are showing to the class.

4.)Have a student working on a problem on the Board while having another student use the Airliner to work on another problem.  Great for Math Classes where the projector screen covers part of your board.

5.)Display a homework assignment. When a student has a question you can stand by the student and use the Airliner to explain the process instead of going to the board.

6.)Give the Airliner to a student; have them use it to explain an answer while you help other students.

7.)Instead of having students come up to the board, pass around the Airliner.

8.)Airliners are a great tool to use when visiting interactive websites. Allow students to control what happens.

9.)Use the screen shade function when wanting to show one question at a time or even one answer at a time. Helps alleviate having to make copies when students can use Notebook Paper.

10.)Use the recording feature to record students doing the work step by step and then play it back for further understanding.

11.)Print a screen shot of your desktop and other features. Place that on the Airliner so you have something to look at if looking at the screen is troublesome.

12.)Using a Document Camera, display your book to the class and highlight areas that you want the students to read, focus on, or take notes from. Great for vocabulary that might not be highlighted by the textbook company. Have students highlight words they don’t know within the text as well. This can be done for any book or text as well.
13.)Use the Spotlight feature to block out text and show just a picture (or vise versa). This really helps kids who get distracted easily.

14.)Take True/False or matching worksheets and use an airliner to mark the answer and then discuss why it is true or false. Do a word search or crossword puzzle activity as a class.

15.)Take student work and highlight what was done right and what was done wrong (make sure you don’t show the students name). You can use a document camera, have the document in its Word Processor, or scan it. Have students discuss what could be done better and what was done right.

Kwik Surveys

Kwik Surveys offers user the ability to create "quick" and easy surveys or forms for completely free.  You have an unlimited number of questions, answers, and surveys that you can create.  Visit Kwik Surveys to see all the features that they advertise, saving me from the trouble of reinventing the wheel and typing it all here.  You can view a 2 Question Demo survey to get an idea of how it will look.  No sign up is necessary, just click on the "Create" button and start creating your own survey.  If you want to save your surveys you will need to create an account however.

Kwik Surveys will be a great way to start the school year and discover information about your students and retrieve results without all the paperwork.  I used a lot of surveys in my classes for the purpose of creating discussion in class.  This site would be useful in getting opinions on hot topics to discuss in classes such as Sociology and History. 

Newsy

Newsy is a site dedicated to merging news stories from various sources into one video clip.  They use various news agencies, newspapers, magazines, and websites to create the story thus provide various views on a news story. 

The news is broken down in to popular categories (US, World, Politics, Business, Tech, Health/Science, and Sports.  I like the organization of Newsy for the purpose of covering current events and getting different views.  It can help create discussion because of the different views you get about different stories.  You could easily adapt the stories from Newsy to many of the subjects in schools while providing an unbiased view.

TinEye - Reverse Image Search

TinEye is a reverse image search engine.  You can upload an image from your computer and search the Internet for it.  You can also paste a image URL and find other places that the image exist on the Internet.  What is neat is that you don't necessarily have to have the same file name.  TinEye will use Image Identification Technology, not keywords, metadata, or watermarks.  The site currently has 1.6 billion images indexed for you to use in your search.

TinEye would be a great site to use to check on students using images in a presentation but did not site the source for where they received the image.  It will also help with those teachers who have students publishing websites to ensure that students did not use copyrighted photos. 

Livestation

Livestation is a site that allows you to watch live TV and listen to radio.  The TV stations are centered around news stations, but Livestation would be a great tool for classrooms that are studying current events and want to see news from other parts of the world.  There are several channels that would be of interest to teachers and provide an alternate source to news.  News stations include Al Jazeera, BBC, NASA, and United Nations.  A valuable news source separate from network and cable news stations that most, at least Americans, are used too.  You can also watch the news from their mobile station on the iPhone and Blackberry.