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Clock (using it for timed testing preparation)

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by MARK WEST 03/10/10

"Right Clicking"

You can "right click" on a Mac with a single button mouse. To do so, you can do either of the following:

  1. Press and hold the Control Key while clicking.
  2. (This one only works if you have a Mac with a touchpad - usually a laptop) place two fingers on the touchpad while clicking.

Using The Clock

This helps meet several grade level expectations for Language Arts: 

0501.3.3 Practice writing to narrative and descriptive prompts within a specified time limit.

0601.3.2 Practice writing to a prompt within a specified time limit.

0701.3.2 Practice writing to a prompt within a specified time limit.

0801.3.2 Practice writing to expository prompts within a specified time limit.

So you've got a writing assessment coming up and you know your students have only 20 minutes (or whatever) to write and you'd like to time your students so they can practice organizing their thoughts in the given time frame. You'd better go out and spend some of your personal dollars on an egg timer... wait! Your Promethean ActivBoard can come to your rescue! It has a built in clock that can count down (or even count up).

To access the clock, you can access it by clicking on the Tools menu, scroll down to More Tools, click it and scroll over to Clock.

Getting to the clock is as easy as Tools, More Tools, and Clock

And this brings up the clock.:

The clock

If you want it to count down, click on the count down button (pictured above). You will see a settings dialog box:

Clock settings

The elipses just sets the folder of the files, which you navigate to the audio clips folder:

Choosing the Clock sounds folder

Once you set the folder, use the drop down menu to set the file name:

Clock settings

When you press OK, the timer immediately starts counting down and when it reaches 00:00:00, the sound will play. Please note that you can set actions (Next page, Previous Page, Start Reveal, Reset Page, Screen Snapshot) as well, although sounds tend to be the most helpful.

Counting Up

Works just like counting down, except that the timer starts at 00:00:00 and stops at the time set to count up to. You can set sounds and actions to trigger when the counter counts up to the time you selected.

Power Tip: The Keyboard Shortcut

You can invoke the clock at anytime that you have ActivInspire open from your keyboard by pressing Shift+Command+U

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