Today's SMART Notebook Gallery Tool Tip #4 is designed to save teachers time (who knew that teachers need more time in their lives?)  Yes, I primarily deal with increasing student interactivity with your SMART Board and yes, I'm a big advocate of re-shaping your classroom to put technology tools in the hands of students, but sometimes you just want to make things in your classroom run a bit more efficiently.

Enter the spinner.

I'm sure you're all very much aware that the spinner exists, but did you know you can actually customize some of the properties of it? Simply click on the double arrow (reminiscent of a rewind button) and voila! You get some options to change the spinner to suit your needs. 

     From this view, you can:

  - change the amount of segments (up to 12)

 - modify the colours of each segment (I personally am not that fond of the neon green default)

 - add text to each piece (?!?!) I wish I'd known that 4 years ago

 - customize the text properties

Oh how my type-A, organizational freak side LOVES this! Suddenly you can design a quick review activity, assign groups, randomly select a student, randomly assign project topics, generate multiple numbers for a Math activity, assign roles in a play -- the possibilities are endless!

If you have a different idea for how you use this spinner in your classroom, I'd love to hear it :)

Vanessa