I {glittery} heart my LCD Projector!

I don't have an interactive whiteboard. Not yet. 

Buuuuuuut I DO have an LCD projector mounted above my whiteboard!

Lemme tell ya, I LOVE this thing! When the color wheel broke last year (after an earthquake - who knew we had earthquakes in NC?) and it was flashing too much to use it (literally my kids were getting headaches from the colors flashing) I didn't know what to do without it!

• We love our online timers, that many others have blogged about, like here.
• We love to use YouTube to introduce new / review old skills.
• We love to watch DiscoveryEd videos after we've packed up and are waiting for buses to be called.
• We love to use some things from SmartExchange or online games like on cookie.com, and we just use the mouse instead of an interactive whiteboard.
• We love to project the graphic organizers we are about to use and practice filling them in together on the whiteboard.

What I can't WAIT to try next year is this super fun thing:

The way Bouncy Balls is designed, it automatically uses a mouse click to send all the balls flying into the air. They come back down again, but they are all jumbled up. There is a button in the top left of the screen to activate your microphone. WHAT?!

When your microphone is activated, the balls can be sent flying by NOISE. Project this, activate microphone, and I bet we will work quietly!

What's that you say? Kids will want to see the balls go flying, and thus will make lots of noise? Hmmm. Must think of a way to manage that.

Here's my game plan, please comment with what you would do:

When introducing Bouncy Balls, we will have 10 seconds to make whatever noise we want and send them flying! Once all the balls have settled onto the ground, we will practice being quiet enough to not disturb them.

Each subsequent time we use Bouncy Balls, we will have 5 seconds to send the balls sky high. After that 5 seconds, we will earn a clip down or a Mighty Oh No for any time that the balls go flying too high during a quiet working time.

"Mighty Oh No"s are part of Whole Brain Teaching's Scoreboard practice. For more FREE information, visit WholeBrainTeaching.com.

Do you have an LCD projector in your classroom? (Or an interactive whiteboard?)

What's your favorite tool?