Adding Mystery and Intrigue to Your SMART Notebook Lessons: Boxes and Screen Shade

Which of these normal, everyday slides from a normal, everyday Notebook lesson grab more of your attention?

What's behind those squares?

You can take the content you already have created in SMART Notebook (or PowerPoint for that matter) and up the interactivity of your lesson in a matter of seconds. By using the Screen Shade or boxes to cover text, images, or writing, you give opportunities for students to:

Predict...

• what's next in a story
• the next step in a mathematical solution
• connections between two ideas
• meaning of new words in context

Signal importance - I feel like my students skim over or miss even the bold words in texts, sometime, so I like that some books highlight, but you can even go the next step and emphasis with a box. 

Focus - When I'm hoping that I say the right words to communicate a concept to a student in the 30 seconds I have their attention, the LAST thing I want is for them to be focusing on something ELSE related to the lesson on the SMARTboard.

The greatest ally to misunderstanding in math class is misinformation. 

"You wrote it on the board, and you said..."
"Yes, but not at the same time..."

Encourage interactivity - that kid may not want to write a lick of the information you're sharing, but you better believe you may entice them with a chance to drag a box.

Now you've got, "Remember when you went to the SMARTboard and moved the boxes? That's what you need to use right now," in your back pocket, even though its surely no where on a piece of paper. :)

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HOW TO...
Screen Shade:

Between boxes or Screen Shade, the easiest of the two to implement would be the shade. Pull up your content, put up the shade, and drag to reveal. I use this most often in my Algebra class to ask, "What do you think I did next?"

The Screen Shade icon

Drag at your own speed...

Boxes

Using boxes is a bit more complicated, but FAR more customizable. Here I've used boxes to cover up the solution to an example I grabbed from my online texbook using the screen capture tool (the camera icon)