SMART Boards - Getting it into the Hands of our Students

An observation was made in our district recently that our IWBs were being utilized as a projection device. The challenge is how can we get this technology into the hands of our students to allow them to interact with the content.

So this got me thinking: What ideas can I offer to make this happen? The left brain part of me thought immediately to organize some ideas into categories. Here are the results:

Classroom Management:

Attendance: Start the day off by having students check in using the SB. As they enter the classroom, part of the routine could be to walk by the board and move their avatar (or name) to indicate they have arrived at school. This page can be as simple or elaborate as you want to make it. 

Lunch Count: Many elementary schools require teachers to send in lunch count for each student. Students could move their avatar or name to indicate their lunch choice. Since students are indicating their lunch choice, you can also see at a glance any students that are absent for the day. 

Morning Information and Activity: Elementary students are always curious about what the day may hold. Satisfy that curiosity with an information bite embedded on a page with a bell ringer activity. Incorporate the wonderful website http://wonderopolis.org/wonders/ by putting the Wonder of the day on the page as well. Be sure to include an opportunity for the students to manipulate the material on the page. In the example pictured here, students would correct the sentence.

Teaching Resource:

By all means, put that board to use as a center in your classroom! While you are working with a small group of students, you can easily see the activity going on at the board. There are lots of ways to incorporate it as a center.

1. Take advantage of the flash templates available in the Lesson Activity Toolkit of Notebook software and create instant center activities to reinforce what you are teaching.
2. Use the page recorder to allow students to record their words their way word sorts or different ways to solve the math problem. You will have an instant item that you could add to an electronic portfolio.
3. I know every teacher is aware of the variety of online "games" that can be used to practice content as well and most all will work beautifully on the SMART Board.
4. Use it as a part of Daily 5 as a Listen to someone read center. Our county has provided many online books that can be utilized in this manner. Allow the students to use the pens, highlighter, or even transparency mode to make the listening activity more interactive. In addition, to Book Flix, Tru-Flix, and Big Universe, you can take advantage of National Geographic for read alouds as well as ncwiseowl.org.
5. Let students use the SMART Board's connected computer to actually create a SMART Board activity to share with a lower grade on concepts they are learning or even share with each other in class.
6. Allow the students to listen to a story from your MP3 player, and draw what they are visualizing on the SMART Board. You never know you may have the next Monet in your class.
7. An idea that I love, is to use the video recorder in SMART. Let the students create a digital story using the features in Notebook and then use the video recorder to record a movie of it. All you will need beside the SMART Board, is a computer microphone to pick up the student's voice. Their creativity will take care of the rest.


So how do you manage the board as a center? Well...
I love this teacher's idea of how to manage the kids in the SMART Board center. She uses a baseball theme, with Who's On, Who's on Deck (for the next person), and Who's in the Hole for those waiting their turn.

Other management ideas can be found in the Lesson Activity Toolkit. Use the random number generator or the random word chooser and that student (or the number representing that student) get's a turn when their name (or number) is up.

Please share your ideas for getting this technology into the hands of the students.

Notebook lesson ideas found on SMART Exchange.

Technology Moving So Quickly

Just a few days ago the teachers and students in our elementary schools celebrated the 100th day of school. The fifth grade at one of my schools ask the students to look into the future and write about what they thought the world would be like in 2113, a hundred years from now.

Throughout each of the essays, I noticed that students recognize what we know as well, technology is changing quickly and is changing our lives in the process. So this got me thinking about what the students of today will never experience, things that I did during my lifetime. My birthday is coming up soon and maybe that is playing a part in the thoughts of this post as well. Just so you know, I didn't "grow up" with technology. Remember it was the early 90's that the Internet became available to the public. At that time computers took up entire rooms! Check out this YouTube Video from The Today Show about the confusion of what the Internet even was.

So what are things that today's students will never experience?

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/

1. Reel-to-reel film projectors: Who remembers walking into class and being excited that a teacher had set up a film for the day? Then the excited that projectors came along that automatically advanced to the next slide? By the time I had my own classroom, technology had advanced to VHS tapes in my VCR! Never would we have dreamed of YouTube, Discovery Streaming, or Netflix.

news.Discovery.com

2. Cassette tapes: What about listening centers set up using cassette tapes and then right in the middle of the book, the cassette player eats the tape. I remember spending time reading books so my students would have something to listen to in the listening center! MP3 players have certainly improved the experience of creating custom playlists.

http://gizmofusion.com

3. Laser Discs: I can vividly recall the day our school librarian walked into my classroom with this huge shiny disc in the hands. Now I grew up listening to vinyl, so the size didn't strike me as much as the shiny look of it. She was so excited and begged me to come the library to see how cool this disc was. She plops into a machine connected to the TV and was able to use the remote control to find the exact track and proceeded to show me a seed growing into a plant (time lapsed photography of course). I was hooked and the kids loved it. Of course, since I was in a "learning cottage", we had to trek to the library anytime we wanted to view something from the disc.

http://www.lyntronix.com/35mm%20film%20canisters.jpg

4. 35mm Film: Digital cameras may very well be a thing of the past with the better quality cameras built into our smart phones, so students today will not know the thrill of taking photos, dropping them into the mail, and waiting a week for the images to arrive. Finally, opening the package to see how well the shots turned out. Oh wait, whose head was cut off in that shot? Oh, no he closed his eyes! How exciting it was when our little town finally got 1 Hour Film Processing!

http://www.designboom.com/history/floppydisk/01.gif

5.Floppy disk: I must confess, I love "the cloud." I no longer carry a flash drive around with me. So I will venture to say that students won't know about these soon either, not to mention floppy disk. Of course, I remember their migration from the large to small version of those.



Of course, these five items are just the tip of the iceberg, there are many more things that I could mention. Thanks for the opportunity to walk down memory lane! What about you, what do you think students of today will never know about or experience?