Samoset Middle School Blog

From Teachers Love SMART Boards Blog
by James Hollis

I found a fabulous interactive website that lets students explore our solar system to get a much clearer understanding about planet orbits, size, and relative position to one another.

The site is simply calledPlanets and it’s a fantastic resource for the SMART Board interactive whiteboard.

The site allows the teacher or student to control how they are viewing the solar system. Users can touch and drag to move things around and they have a complete set of controls to change scale, speed of orbits (passing of time), or planetary object to follow. For example, if you follow the Sun, the Sun is stationary and it shows the other planets orbiting the Sun. If you  follow the Earth, then it shows the other planetary objects with a stationary Earth.

For you Pluto lovers, this resource shows Pluto as being the farthest “planet” away from the Sun. )

I hope you enjoy this incredible resource for the SMART Board. Please share it with your fellow teachers.

Sharing Is Caring!

Tags: Science

by James Hollis from Teachers love Smartboards Blog

If you’re a teacher looking for a good online resource for studying vocabulary, you might want to review the WordAhead Vocabulary Videos and Flash Cards site. One of the reasons I like this site is it allows students to take a greater role in their own education, whether they’re studying for the SAT or the ACT or whether they are using the site as an ESL resource.

The WordAhead site allows you to choose from hundreds of words to review in video format. Each video uses graphics, text, and audio to describe the word, give it’s definition, and present the word in various contextual situations to provide a deeper understanding of the word. You can also view the videos in fullscreen which is great for displaying on the SMARTBoard.

Read the rest of the article here.

Tags: Smartboard