Friday, October 12, 2007

The Lesson Activity Toolkit

So I found this beta of the Lesson Activity Tool Kit. It allows the teacher to make interactive activities for the smartboard. The firist one I made was a sorting activity for the characteristics of spiders adn insects. It is very easy to use. I created the activity in no time at all. I enter the words to be sorted. I key it and then exit edit mode. The program put them in random slots along the bottom of the page and I could drag them to the sorting space. I click the button to "check" them. Imagine that I can actually figure out my own assignment. I hit the reset button and they are scrambled and move to the bottom again. There is also a Solve button that puts them in the right coloumns.

Overall a good little toolkit that allows the user to generate their own activities. The website states that there are known issues with the Toolkit on a Mac, sad.
Overall I have found that it works well but it does need the latest version of the Notebook software. A problem at school as they loaded the old version.
The students loved the activity. This teacher has them fired up on Spiders.