The Awards Maker can be utilized for more than the Awards Ceremonies. Here are some ideas on how to utilize it year round! Use it to fundraise, create incentives, highlight specific programs, or educate.

Fundraising

Create stickers to sell during Valentine’s Day rather than sell carnations. There are several great templates in the Design Center software you could use to sell these unique valentines.

Sell stickers to support different clubs in your school. Whether it is the chess club, drama club or even a sport, you can create small stickers that students can stick to mugs or notebooks. You could also use the bumper sticker templates for a bigger sticker with a larger profit.

For spirit week, sell graduation year stickers and use this as a way to see who has the most spirit – the more stickers sold equals a winner! High Schools students will enjoy the creations you make on the clear sticker because they can stick these onto the windshields of their cars.

If sporting events cause trouble with parking, why not make a few bucks off of it? Sell VIP parking passes that you can create using the Awards Maker. Let these folks park in the spots closest to the stadium.

Get your Marketing classes involved on the fundraising and ask them to contact local businesses. Sell water bottles, notebooks, or pencils with special labels during sporting events or during lunch periods. The sticker may even include a coupon, so student can take the water bottle or sticker to the business for a special discount.

Create Incentives

Highlight student achievements in the Accelerated Reader program by giving them a bookmark for each new level they reach in the program. Simply print one of the ribbon stickers and stick to manila card stock to create a sturdy, useful award to keep them reading!

p>Motivate students to hand in assignments in a timely manner by creating simple, quick stickers that say something like “way to go”. These stickers can be personalized with their name to make them special.

When a student consistently makes improvements in their grades, why wait to give them an award at the awards ceremony? Create a plaque or bumper sticker to show them you see their efforts and are proud of what they’ve accomplished.

Use the Awards Maker to create stickers that show a student their improvements. Maybe you’re working on learning a complicated concept. Give them an award for after mastering each portion of the concept. By the end of the unit, they will have all collected a complete set of these incentives.

Highlight Specific Programs

If you are working on character education year round, pass out stickers to students who embody the concept you are teaching. For example, you notice one of your students is willing to share supplies with another classmate. Showcase that student’s positive behavior with a small sticker with her name and what she embodies.

<

Start a “Random Acts of Kindness” program at your school and reward students with a sticker when you see them exhibit kindness to classmates. This small incentive will help them to understand how their behavior has made a positive impact within the school.

If your school has a Head Start program, create bumper stickers to help the program grow. The more exposure the program has in the community, the better your chances are of enrolling additional students.

Create plaques or window stickers for teachers who are working towards or earned their National Certification. This allows parents and visitors to see how many teachers you have that are dedicated to their own growth as educators.

Educate

The bumper sticker templates can help teachers create word walls in their classrooms. All the colored sticker media has a temporary adhesive making them easy to peel off of the wall after use. Because the stickers are not made of paper, they shouldn’t apply to the percentage of wall space covered by paper rule the Fire Department enforces.

You can also create stickers the students can utilize while they are learning new concepts like math formulas or grammar rules. The more they see the rules and concepts, the more likely they are to remember them. If it’s posted on their notebook, they’ll see and use them every day!

Create puzzles by creating stickers with vocabulary words and definitions on separate stickers. Press the stickers to a card stock to make them sturdy and use them like flash cards. Have the students match the words to their definitions for a group project that is fun and educational.

As you can see, there are several great applications that you can utilize your Awards Maker for in addition to the twice yearly Awards ceremony. With the quick print times, you can get in and out of the workroom with great incentives that will wow your students with little effort on your part!

To view Varitronics® full-line of visual learning products, click here.

SMART Ideas software brings the power of visual learning to your classroom. Students can better analyze and understand complex ideas by building multilevel interactive maps in this fun, colorful software. These exciting presentations take students through concepts one level at a time for greater clarity, with the maps easily converting into multipage Web sites for everyone to share.

With the software’s easy navigation features, you can easily view maps in various formats to help students learn from multiple perspectives. The convenience of the global view feature allows you to show all the map levels at once, while the presentation view option removes toolbars for a large, clear display.

You can also swiftly switch between the diagram view and the text outline view to demonstrate the connection between visual and written ideas. SMART Ideas also allows you to enhance maps with curriculum-specific and interactive clip art to aid learning and make lessons interesting, effortlessly adding multimedia content and links. Click here for product brochure »

Receive a complimentary SMART Ideas software license from SMART Technologies by registering your SMART Board Interactive Whiteboard on SMART’s Web site. Just include your email address with your product registration, and a SMART Ideas software license will be emailed to you.

InFocus announced two new additions to its projector line specifically for the education market. The projectors (IN5534 and IN5504) both have a new split-screen option, which will virtually eliminate the need for multiple projectors in classrooms. Both projectors, specified at WUXGA (1,920 x 1,200) resolution, are network/wireless ready and feature analog and HD video connectivity. The two models are easy to camouflage in nearly any environment thanks to InFocus’ custom case parts available in multiple colors, including white, black, walnut, and ready to paint.

For more information about AVI-SPL’s line of InFocus projectors, click here »

To address K-12 schools’ needs for interactive whiteboard projection solutions, Epson, one of the number-one selling projector brands worldwide, recently introduced the PowerLite 410W short throw, widescreen projector. An upgrade to the incredibly popular PowerLite 400W – the industry’s first short throw, widescreen 3LCD projector – the PowerLite 410W offers native WXGA resolution (1280×800) for use with widescreen computers and 16:10 interactive whiteboards, and additional enhancements including a shorter throw lens, increased brightness and an optional wall mount for added flexibility.

Featuring a shorter throw lens than the previous model, the PowerLite 410W projects a 60-inch 16:10 image from two feet away, making it ideal for wall mounting. This improved design gives more space to students and teachers in smaller classrooms, while drastically reducing shadows from presenters.

Click here to read the complete article »

Reading and writing are an active part of any subject, but the transition from reading fiction in an English classroom to reading scientific journals and non-fiction can be difficult for some students. Learning how to write lab reports and papers can be tough too! Here are some ways you can utilize the VariQuest Poster Maker, Awards Maker and Cutout Maker to help smooth the transition.

Reading

Try modeling reading a scientific journal article with the class to help them understand how reading in the science classroom is different. Show and explain the purpose of an abstract. Read it together and afterwards, fill out the K (what I know) and W (what I want to know) part of a K-W-L chart poster together as a class. This can help the students set a foundation allowing them check their comprehension before they delve further into the article.

Show the students how to utilize graphs and other tables in the article by enlarging these into a poster. This is an easy task when you take advantage of the scan and print feature on the Poster Maker. You can model how you would stop reading to turn to the visual for additional information. Ask the students to come up to the poster and show the class where what they’ve read is shown on the table, chart or graph. This way, they’ll begin to understand that reading science related news is often more than simply reading text and can take more time.

Finally, use the Cutout Maker or Awards Maker to create large versions of new vocabulary. While reading, stop when you come across a new word. Attach each word to your white board as it is identified in the text. This will help indicate how they would want to write these words down and look them up as they are reading. Give the students dictionaries to look each word up as you run across them and write the definition on your board. You may even want to take a moment to check their comprehension of the definition. Learning the vocabulary immediately, rather than skipping over words they don’t know, is an important skill that will help them throughout their educational career. There is ample opportunity to teach students new words and this skill within science related reading. After the demonstration, you can post the cutout words to a word wall in your classroom and even create lessons out of the uncovered vocabulary.

In addition to vocabulary words, they may encounter unfamiliar symbols. Use the Cutout Maker to decorate a bulletin board to promote their visual vocabulary too! For example, they may not understand the symbols on a weather map, chemical structure diagrams, international symbols of units, etc. You can find many science-related shapes in the Cutout Maker’s library to help create visuals for your classroom!

Reading and writing are an active part of any subject, but the transition from reading fiction in an English classroom to reading scientific journals and non-fiction can be difficult for some students. Learning how to write lab reports and papers can be tough too! Here are some ways you can utilize the VariQuest Poster Maker, Awards Maker and Cutout Maker to help smooth the transition.

Writing

Writing expectations differ from those in the student’s English classroom. Familiarize them with the scientific method, APA formatting and your personal expectations by creating posters and cutouts.

One of the helpful posters you can keep up in your classroom year round is a checklist the students can refer to that ensures they cover all aspects of the scientific method in their papers and reports.

Another helpful poster you could utilize is a scientific method of inquiry poster. The students can begin each experiment learning to fill out this poster together. After the experiments are complete, they’ll be able look at their initial thoughts and learn from them. This could even help improve their writing skills if after each experiment; they are required to write a small report.

Another helpful poster for every classroom is a rubric. Create a poster that you post in your classroom all year that displays the expectations and what qualifies a paper as an “A”, “B”, “C” and so on. They’ll know what is expected of them!