What I'm up to

Well, it's been a while since my first post. I'm one of the ones Joe keeps targeting in his email about keeping up with blog posts once a month. During the last skype conversation, I mentioned how rough my year has been going. Between classroom management and learning a new reading curriculum, there has been no time for anything else. But I have been able to use the Smartboard several times a day, so I'm finally blogging about it.
I admit that sometimes I use the Smartboard as a glorified overhead. But, as Sara mentioned, I also use some of the activities in Notebook. Notebook 10 has a folder called Lesson Activity Toolkit 1.0. (I think it is also downloadable from the website.) In it there are some great activities and tools (go figure.) The interactivity is already set up, we, as teachers, just have to "edit" and put in our words or sentences or pictures or customize it to our content. Lots of potential. Too often, however, I think of great ideas or lessons to put together and simply don't have time to create them. I would love to have some time off just dedicated to creating Smartboard lessons that relate directly to our math and reading programs. (Maybe if the teaching thing doesn't work out...)
Collaborating with Sara has been great and I do hope we establish an online place to share actitivities and lessons we have created as well as the reading fluency exemplars and other exemplars we have digitally documented (as we discussed in the last skype conversation.)
One of the few other tools that I regularly use is Diigo. In searching for Smartboard lessons, I have collected many sites about Web 2.0 and Smartboards as well as looked at the lists of other Diigo users.