netTrekker d.i.
It’s Linda Morrell Day!
At Thinkronize, we value our customers and continue to appreciate their feedback and support towards our mission… ”enhancing the education of youth with highly effective technologies”.
Linda Morrell
Today, we would like to honor one of the first and most prominent advocates for netTrekker d.i. – Linda Morrell – Instructional Technology Director at Cobb County, GA. Linda provided netTrekker d.i. district-wide to Cobb County in the earliest years and with her team have provided us with a wealth of knowledge. We want to honor Linda Morrell by officially making today, February 27, 2009 – Linda Morrell day at Thinkronize!
You can join in on our well wishes at the netTrekker Village.
Joel Petersen
VP Strategic Relations
Thinkronize – Makers of netTrekker d.i
You mean I can add MORE collections?
YES, YOU CAN add to the collections already in netTrekker d.i.! And you’ll be pleasantly surprised to find out that it’s Weekly Reader Express (WRE). If you’re like me, you have fond memories of getting this great magazine as a child. Now you can provide your students with the same great info through your netTrekker subscription! It simply appears in your Collections Refinement Menu as well as integrated with other resources in Search Results pages once you order it.
And the best part is that you can search their database of articles, teacher’s guide content, and reproducible activities from eleven Weekly Reader classroom magazines from 2000 to the present. —over 7 million words in all!
WRE covers a broad range of academic topics, from social studies and English language arts to science, health, current events, and career development in all eleven of their magazines.
Can you honestly resist a magazine with such great covers? Give me a gorilla any day! “How do I get this?” you ask. You can get a free trial or add it to your subscription by calling 877-517-1125 or emailing sales@netTrekker.com.
For even more details, check this out: Weekly Reader Express.
Be SMART with Interactive Notebooks
Earlier in the week, we featured the Promethean Collection of interactive Flipchart lessons. The SMART Collection in netTrekker d.i. also provides you with over 1,000 interactive whiteboard lessons to use with your students, even if you don’t have a whiteboard.
Check SMART on the Collections menu to browse SMART notebook lessons
Developed in SMART Notebook software, lesson activities are correlated to curriculum standards and you can easily customized each lesson to suit the needs of your classroom. Each one is created in a subject-specific template with an age-appropriate design and works for a range of grades. Many SMART-created lesson activities have interactive multimedia files and dynamic graphics that students will love.
To locate SMART resources, perform a keyword search and then use the Collections refinement menu to quickly browse over 1,000 SMART notebook lessons.
This week to celebrate Valentine’s Day, American Heart Month or during your study of the body systems, have a great hands-on review of the functions of the chambers of the heart by doing a keyword search for the Circulatory System. In the Refinement Menu for collections check SMART on the Collections menu. Once you learn about the heart, there is an interactive piece where you actually put the heart back together and resuscitate a patient.
Simply click on Download Notebook Interactive Viewer to download SMART notebook lessons
Don’t have a SMART Board yet? Follow the link to the smarttech website at the bottom of the screen, select software downloads and simply click on “Download Notebook Interactive Viewer” . You will then be able to view any of the Notebooks found in netTrekker d.i.
It’s that SMART!
Collections: Quia
It’s Monday morning in the computer lab, I was just informed that the 5th graders will be coming to the computer lab to work on their geography projects. I have 5 minutes to prepare some extra activities for those students that finish early – and for me that means it is time to find Quia activities.
Quia has created a concept that provides educators “the ability to create customized educational software online, built around their own course materials and made available to their students over the web.” Over a million educators have registered to use this service and almost 700 of these shared assessments have been catalogued in netTrekker d.i.
The Quia activities found in netTrekker d.i. span over 100 categories from Accounting to Zoology in the form of quizzes and tests including matching games, scavenger hunts, hangman, and much more. These assessments can be accessed by individual students or for whole class instruction.
I login to netTrekker d.i., click on the Middle School tab, enter the keyword geography and click search. From these 1000+ resources, it is very simple to pull out only the Quia activities by using the Quia Collection Refinement menu… I can hear them coming down the hall … I have 1 minute before they arrive in the lab… I quickly select 4 of the Quia activities, Save to My Portfolio in a folder shared in the School Portfolio… the 5th grade class has arrived and I am ready to help them with their geography project and also direct them to some extra activities!
netTrekker d.i. has over 70 Quia resources catalogued in the Elementary section. Some of the more popular include activities to help students practice 
geography and map skills. Jeopardy-like games are utilized to practice reading skills for the emerging reader – by practice alphabetizing, rhyming words, and word families.
netTrekker di has over 130 Quia resources catalogued in the Middle School section. Some of the most popular include activities to help students practice matching up the World Language vocabulary. And to get students off to a good start on a research paper – have them play a challenge board game to review info needed for a research paper.
netTrekker di has over 140 Quia resources catalogued in the High School section. Some of the most popular include activities to help students review economics vocabulary. 
Newton’s 3 Laws of Physics can be confusing – until a student practices matching the terms with the definition.
Quia provides high-interest activities for the student by providing them with an interactive game to practice and learn skills and facts. Even though the students think that they are playing games, they will actually be learning geography!
As an added bonus by using Quia within netTrekker d.i. – you have the assistive tools for your students to use with the Quia activities – Assessments with Assistance! Dictionary HotKey provides definitions and translations for the instructions listed with the Quia activity, and for those students needing auditory support, instructions can be read to the student with the Read Aloud feature.
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