Episode 5

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Jim Hollis and Harvey Almarode return with episode five of Get SMART with SMART Boards. This week Jim brings a "random" theme to the podcast where he shares a great website for randomly selecting students and he also shares a technique for creating a random spinner using the Notebook software. In finishing his random theme, Jim shares an amazing trick for customizing the Random Number Generator flash object inside the Notebook Gallery. Watch Jim's video and see how easy and fun it is to create your own customized random number generator.

Harvey shares one of the best classroom clip art sites on the Internet called Phillip Martin's Free Clip Art. He also shares his custom Notebook application called Cubes and Balances. To help listeners develop Notebook applications, Harvey finishes with a tip on how to quickly lock down objects on a page and discusses why this can help when you're developing Notebook applications.

Click to listen or right click to download

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Episode Resources

Website Recommendations 

• Free Clip Art by Phillip Martin

• ClassTools.net Random Name Pickers

Notebook Application Files

• Cubes and Balances

• Custom Spinner

• Halloween Random Number Generator (as seen in the image to the right)

Tips & Tricks

• Customizing the Random Number Generator (video)

• Creating a Random Student Selector Course

Miscellaneous

• Notebook File Downloads: If you experience problems opening the Notebook files, make sure you Save the file instead of Opening the file. If the file extension gets changed to <.zip> after you save the file, rename the file so the extension is <.notebook> and you should then be able to open the file using Smart Notebook. Switching to the Firefox browser may also help.

• Teacher Online Training Educator Subscription Special
  
  
Teachers can subscribe to Teacher Online Training for the entire school year (ending May 31, 2010) for only $72. The earlier you sign up, the more you save. Offer expires October 15, 2009.

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Comments

[Jen]

I have a problem with the SMART Board's random number generator and am hoping you can help. Is there a way to make it so that there are no duplicate numbers chosen? For example, I program it for #1-20, and it seems that it will randomly select maybe 5-10 numbers at first and then it duplicates what was already selected... It is frustrating because you keep hearing from the kids, "#11 already went, #5 already went, #2 already went, etc." so it defeats the purpose of being an efficient way to select students. Any ideas?
Thanks!

[Erika C.]

What ideas are there for utilizing pre-made whiteboard lessons from the internet with a Hitachi StarBoard and a Mac? This is the technology available to me at my school but I find most ready-made interactive lessons for SmartBoard etc. won't work with the StarBoard technology.

[Diana]

Completely off topic but is any of SMART Notebook software switch accessible?