Smartboards
I know that there are many schools that don’t have it in their budgets for smart-boards but the schools that do, I believe that there are so useful. I had the privilege while student teaching to have access to a smart-board and I think it enhances students learning abilities. Students are more involved in what is being taught and retain more of the information. Not only do smart-boards add color to what is being taught, you can do some much more with it. I had to teach a lesson on vertebrates and invertebrates, so i used the smart-board and showed my students a video. Before we watched the video I constructed a K.W.L. on the smart-board. During and after the video, I had my students come up and fill in the different parts. Once the lesson was over I had all of my students make a double bubble map on the two. I was amazed on how much they retained. I owe it all to the smart-board. I say this because when I was in High school(a long time ago) my teachers would teach us on the old black boards and I would loose interest within 5 mins. I love smart-boards and hopefully will have one in my classroom. Any other great uses for smart-boards???
February 8th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Hey I also am new to blogging and I see u go to pace also by any chance are you in Prof Calverts class Ts 654. For my page I went to designs and used the mandigo theme which gives a lot of customization options. As far as my podcast I recorded it using sound forge and uploaded it on to my blog along with the pictures it was fairly simple to do. As far as the widgets I am not to sure but I think you have to pay for new ones like delicious and flickr I actually asked someone about that. I wish I had more answers for you but I to am new
Best Regards
Anthony
PS I look forward to reading your blogs
February 8th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
Adam,
SmartBoards are amazing! They have many courses you can take with them, but at the end of the day many of the cool features you learn on your own. Just spend a little time working around and figuring out different things. I use a SmartBoard on a daily basis and have lessons set up like 8-1 Negative Exponents and Zero Exponents, then when I finish the lesson I re-save as 8-1 Negative Exponents and Zero Exponents done. This way if a student is absent I can open the notebook file that I did in class, print, and hand to the student. It is very worthwhile to save your files neatly. This year I am teaching the same course as I did last year and most of my files are already set up and ready to go. Saves a lot of time!!
February 9th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Hi Dan, what a great student teaching experience you had. Although I havent’ lay my hands in one of the smartboards yet, I am fascinated with what this tool can do (I’ve seen tons of videos in youtube). Smartboards catch the students’ attention and interest in the subject being taught. Also students can participate in the instruction by manipulating the smartboard with the teacher’s permission. I totally understand what you meant about dozing off during class, many times I felt the same way. I don’t even remember half of the stuff I was taught. I think the knowledge retention was so low because of the lack of interest. Smart boards are here to change that for our students. That’s my hope!
Mildred
February 9th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
I am also a fan of using smart boards in a classroom. I was fascinated the first time I learned to use them which was in my Assistive technology for learning with Disabilities class. We got to use smart board with programs that would help children with disabilities. I had to teach how to use “Dragon Speaker” on smart board and it was the best thing that could be applied. You speak aloud to the speaker & you can see in a giant screen how it writes away in Microsoft Word a full sentence or a story. Just genius!
February 11th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
From the teacher side of things, SmartBoards are great for recording lessons. One teacher in our math department has every lesson, example, and practice lesson she has written on the board saved from the past 5 years! What a tremendous resource for both teachers and students.
I also find that just the use of the board keeps student interest. Especially if from time to time you allow the student to come to the board and write on it.
If you are a math teacher look for the “virtual calculators” that are available out there… Kids get a real kick out of seeing a big graphing calculator up in the board that they can touch and work just like a regular one.