Happy Friday, everyone!

Just finishing off a wonderful week full of SMART Board/Notebook/Response workshops with teachers who had a lot of enthusiasm -- even in the midst of report card season!

Today's Fresh Look Fridays post comes courtesy of a participant from one of my Victoria workshops -- Sue Panton.  Storyline Online is a great website for use in an elementary classroom and as with all Fresh Look Fridays websites, it's especially effective when used on a SMART Board.  

Choose a children's book, and have a famous actor or actress read the story to you. Try "Betty White reads Harry the Dirty Dog" (below)

Added bonus? The ability to turn on the captioning at the bottom -- an excellent option for visual reinforcement to support beginning readers.

As you may have noticed, this site isn't immediately interactive per se, at least not in the traditional context that we think of.  But the possibilities as to how this can fit into the context of a learning environment are endless! Some examples:

1. Play this during lunchtime for a bonus readalong (as per Sue's suggestion)

2. Use this to model guided reading.  Have students take turns pointing at each individual word on the SMART Board as the it is read aloud.

3. Use the pause feature to engage students in predictions -- "What do you think will happen to Harry the dog next?"

4. For an extension activity, have students recreate this using audio and video capturing software.  The easiest way? Hook up an external mic (or the use the internal one if you're using a Mac), hook up a document camera to display each page of the story, then record the students reading the book and flipping the pages using the SMART Recorder within Notebook software.  Voila! New stories to listen to each class, that their peers have created themselves!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Vanessa