I spend the majority of my time hanging out with teachers at pd sessions, sharing some examples of practical ways to implement curriculum linked SMART Board lessons and facilitating their work as they build their own lessons.

One thing that I cannot stress enough during these workshops is to find ways to make your life/classroom easier, more efficient, unique, fun and engaging.  The gallery in SMART Notebook contains thousands of pictures, backgrounds, Notebook pages and interactive components -- some are quite standard but many can add a fantastic feature that you may not be able to easily replicate.

For some reason, while myself and numerous other SMART consultants/trainers repeatedly guide teachers to looking in the Gallery first before creating their own activities, it's often quite overlooked.  I myself am guilty of not thoroughly exploring some of the tools available -- particularly those housed in the Lesson Activity Toolkit.

Enter a stream of blog posts over the next few weeks that will be devoted to featuring one of these tools.  Today's tip is the Text Splitting Tool (which is found in the Lesson Activity Toolkit 2.0)

Basically, you just follow the directions -- drag or type text into the box, then choose whether you want to split that text into words or letters.  For example, I might drop lines from a Shakespearean tragedy into the box so that they can be split into individual words which students can then move around to make better meaning of that oh-so-hard-to-understand "old English".

So this:

becomes this:

Check it out!

Look for more Gallery items in upcoming blog posts :)

Vanessa