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Here's a fun little tool that could liven up the way you present information - or make a class writing task a little more fun.

The newspaper generator lets you put your own text into a few boxes, and then generates an authentic looking newspaper article containing your text.

The finished product is very authentic, and quite impressive.

You have to save your image and host it elsewhere if you want to use it online, but it is a very quick process to host it on Flickr or similar.

YAYTB

or.. Yet Another You Tube Downloader

ConvertTube is yet another website that will let you download YouTube videos and save them as different file formats to use offline. Again, handy for teachers that can't get YouTube at school.

http://www.converttube.com/

Thanks to Lisa Thumann for the link.

Smartboard Browser

I just found this post on the Smart Exchange forum by Quentin D'Souza of teachinghacks.com. He has written a fab little flash tool that you can add to a Smart Notebook page which will let you browse the internet within Notebook itself.

You can add it to the My Content area of your Gallery, and drag it onto a page whenever you want to use it. It's PC only for now, see the note from JoeS about it not working properly on Macs.

The instructions to use it are as follows:

a) To Bring Into Notebook

1. Right-Click on http://www.teachinghacks.com/files/Browser.swf and select 'Save Target As" and place on your desktop
2. Open up Smart Notebook
3. In Notebook - Select from Insert Menu "Flash File" and then locate the "Browser.swf" on your desktop
4. Drag the SWF in your Notebook file to your Gallery.

b) To Use:

1. Click on the Browser to Activate it
2. Enter the url and select enter.
3. Default Web Browser Opens to the Web Page You Entered.

Thanks Quentin for sharing this!

Google Sky

Previously only available via Google Earth, which you had to download and run locally, Google have now made Google Sky available online to access anywhere with an internet connection.

Now you can browse the night sky and zoom in on any interesting galaxies or star clusters that you like.

Google Sky via kwout

If you haven't tried them, also check out Google Mars and Google Moon for surface maps based on information from various Moon and Mars missions.

Remember you can use the camera function in your interactive whiteboard software to make any screengrabs from any part of the map and bring it into your IWB software to annotate over the top. You can also put these images into your resource library/gallery for later use.

Animoto Again

Now back with loads of photos from my skiing holiday last week, I thought I'd have another play with Animoto and make a full length movie. I think the end result is pretty good, and not bad for $3, especially with the exchange rate at the moment.

Rub and Reveal

Here's a quick idea for using an interactive whiteboard. It could be a lesson starter, or form part of a plenary or could just be used throughout the lesson as a quick check on what the students have learnt so far.

This is something that always goes down well when I demonstrate it in training sessions as it is so quick and easy to do, but can be used in a range of different ways.

Watch the video here.

How do you do this?

1. Use the text tool to type some text on the notebook page
2. Use the pen tool to draw over the top of the text to hide it (you may want to make the pen thick and match the colour to the background)
3. When you are ready to reveal the writing, click on the Eraser tool and rub out the pen to reveal the text hiding behind it.

Another way of hiding the text could be using shapes to hide the text which can then be moved away or deleted when you want to reveal the word.

How might you use this?

This could be used as the example in the video for hiding labels on a diagram, getting the students to label it, and then revealing the correct answer.

It could also be used to hide the answers to questions given to the students on the screen.

A photograph could be completely covered in black pen, and then the eraser used to gradually reveal parts of the photograph, asking the students at different stages what they can see and what they can infer from what they see.

This is also a quick way of producing missing words activities - type or copy/paste in a block of text and instead of having to go through and delete the missing words and add spaces, just cover each word you want to take out with white pen. It's also easier to reveal the correct answer too.

if you want the Smart Notebook file with the above example of labelling David Beckham in French, then click here to download it.

(Footnote: apologies to any readers from across the sea if I keep calling it the rubber tool on the video. I try to call it the eraser, but over here we call it the rubber. I do know that word has different connotations over where, but just put it down to English eccentricity and go with it!)

Smart Activity Toolkit

The Smart Activity Toolkit has been available in Beta for a while now, but I am constantly meeting people who haven't heard of it.

For those who haven't seen it, its a bank of Flash-based widgets that are placed in your Smart Gallery. These widgets can be dragged onto your Smart Notebook page and then adapted to make your own interactive resources.

These include drag and drop labelling tasks, games of Hangman (or splat the teacher), sorting activities etc. Each one can be edited and the changes saved within the Notebook file.

You can download the Toolkit Beta from the Smart website here. And keep an eye out for the full release next year which has even more new features.

I must admit I haven't got many examples of its use on my own website, I must sit down sometime and produce some sample files. But Jim Birney of Fife Education has some good examples for Science on his site.