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Monday, January 25, 2010

Smart Board

I found that working with the samrt board creates many different and new opportunities for a teacher to expand the classroom. I could see it being very useful for elementary ed teachers since it will be a very good way to keep the students attentive with all of the different creative tools which come with the smart board. It also has very useful games and simulators which could work from any variety of subject, from grammar games for english to virtual frog dissection in science. As a history major, the tool which I found to be most useful would be the interactive maps. It would clearly be a useful tool when teaching geography, but it will also be very helpful when discussing wars, or even ancient empires. One criticism I do have about the smart board from my breif experiences with them is that many of their tools and activities seem to be very geared toward elementary classrooms, and they don't seem to have many High School level activities. Hopefully with more time and more usage the smart board will become an essential for any level teacher.

2 comments:

jjameson said...

I definitely agree with you, Mike. I noticed this when we were working with the Smart Board in CLA. There are not many applications you can use with high schoolers. I mean, don't get me wrong, you can use the pens and correct and edit things in front of a class or do the same things with websites. But in terms of the activities Smart Board has to offer, there are not many geared toward older students. Maybe this is the reason I did not use the one we had in my high school very much. Just a thought. However, as a twenty year old sophomore in college, I did get quite the kick out of playing around with all of the games and doing all of the little tricks you could do, so overall, definitely not a bad thing!

Caitlin said...

I also agree with you, Mike, and I was thinking about that the other day in class when I was trying to plan out our project. Trying to use it for literature, I found a lot of different ways to incorporate more elementary ideas, like moving sentences into the correct order based on the plot or "match the character with his description." For more advanced lessons like discussing motifs in literature, for example, I'm not yet sure how exactly the Smartboard can be fully utilized. I also fully agree that I was more than amused by some of the fun things that can be done with the technology, but its practical application for high school seems to be a little fuzzy to me at this point.