Teaching+with+Smart+Boards

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=Here are the links to the SMART Technologies =

What content works the best when using Smart Boards?

=General Smart Board in Education= Smart Boards are probably the coolest invention ever made for teachers. You can do almost anything with them--surf the net, navigate through personal or professional webpages, create stories in motion (such as The Three Bears), and use it as an updated, new and improved white board. I really like giving students the opportunity to use the Smart Board; it's so easy to navigate. SmartBoards are a computer/whiteboard/media player all in one.

Smart boards have so many features. All schools should have them. Students can use the internet and the teacher can easily monitor the students' online activity. They can also learn how to use a lot of different types of programs through the Smart Board. It can save a teacher a lot of time by allowing easy access to internet sites and it can be switched from a computer screen to a writing tablet. Students will want to volunteer to go to the Smart Board. It could even be used for a reward. The possibilities are endless.

Smart Boards may be used as white screens, but they should not be limited to such use. I have been in a classroom with access to a Smart Board but all it was used for was to project the PowerPoint onto it. This is a sad waste of money and technology. If the school truly wanted this they could have bought a drop screen and saved about half the money. We must be careful to use the technology and not just waste it. I think one major issue people tend to overlook is the ability of teachers to use technology. I am in Block III and thankfully am enrolled in class that is supposed to teach us how to use technology. So far so good; I actually was able to set up a gmail account. I'm pretty slow when it comes to technology. Honestly, I don't like it because I don't understand how to use it. So as far as having Smart Boards go, yeah, they are pretty awesome but we need to make sure educators can utilize them.

I recently used the Smart Board when I taught my Block III Lesson. The students weren't used to having an interactive lesson, and I truly feel it was a welcomed change for them. More of the students seemed to be engaged, which was a great feeling for me! The cooperating teacher even asked if I minded her using the file after I was gone!! That alone was a great compliment!! I did still follow the cooperating teacher's routine by writing the date, assignment, etc. on the whiteboard. The smart Board is a wonderful tool to use, but for some things, the whiteboard or chalkboard are still needed. I will definitely be using a Smart Board in my classroom!!!

SMART boards allows interaction in the classroom. It also creates a setup which allows the users to keep all their information in one area (organization skills) rather than having ten hand-outs, six web sites, and seven books. SMART board also allows the user to print pages from the program in order to create hand-outs.

SMART Boards are great for teachers. The interaction for the students in the classroom is a positive influence. The students get a great experience using new technology in the classroom. The many different applications on the SMART Board makes it interesting for the students. In the SE300 course was the first time I was interacted with a SMART Board. I understand that they are extremely expensive, but they are such a great assets for the classroom.

=Art= SMART Board is great for many subjects. As a future art teacher, I found it very useful and interactive. I found using the SMART board engages the student's that don't enjoy art production as much as other student's. You can use the SMART Board with any grade level. The notebook software is easy to use. It's similar to working with Power Point, and the students love getting involved in the lesson. The notebook software really allows for interactive learning. You can use it for many different types of lessons.

SMART Board Notebook software uses in the Art Classroom **Here is an example of how I would use the notebook software to interactively teach my students how to critique a piece of art.** =**Business**= When I was completing my Block III field experience unit, I used the Smart Board every day! I love the Smart Board! It is a VERY effective way to demonstrate computer application skills to students. Also I used the Airliner that allowed me to walk around the room and still control the Smart Board just as if I was actually touching it. If you have a classroom with a Smart Board, try to get one of these Airliner devices for your classroom. They are awesome!
 * You can draw on it like a whiteboard or chalkboard, but it is less messy (chalk dust)
 * You can save drawings and examples for future use
 * You can draw over existing images without permanently altering them: conceptualize changes to a work of art; label, circle, or highlight parts of a work you are discussing
 * You can create interactive presentations. For whatever you are talking about, you can formulate a presentation so that students can go up to the board and write comments, organize and sort, list answers, draw, or label and identify parts in an artwork. [[image:http://edcompassblog.smarttech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Daniel_drawing-letters.jpg width="377" height="250"]]

Uses for Business classrooms:
 * Accounting- make a list of accounts and have students drag each account to an //assets//, //liabilities//, or //owner's equity// section
 * Accounting- help students understand the rules of debit and credit (Example:[[file:DebitandCredit.pdf]])
 * Businesss Law- students can drag different qualities of businesses to match which goes with //sole proprietorships//, //partnerships//, and //coorporations//
 * Entrepreneurship- students can put entrepreneurial characteristics in order of those they think are the most important to the least important. Each group will arrange them differently!
 * Entrepreneurship- students can list risks and advantages of being an entrepreneur
 * Business Management- students can learn the different types of conflict handling strategies (Example: [[file:ConflictHandlingStrategies.pdf]])

Theses are just a few of the ways you can use Smart Boards in a Business setting!

=English= Another content area in which Smart Boards could be used is English. There are so many applications for teaching composition and reading comprehension skills, but I can think of a very specific application. Remember having to fill out those boring grammar worksheets? Here is a Smart Board solution: Find an example of a celebrity's quote that has grammatical errors, pull this up on the Smart Board, and let students correct the celebrity's grammar! Much more fun than worksheets.

Another great way to utilize the Smart Board in English is through DOL (daily oral language). You can have a sentence on the board, and let students come up and correct it with the pen. This allows students to get up from their desk as well. You can also have words on the board and students can move them under a t-chart that has something like NOUN/VERB on it. You can have students move the correct words under the chart. This could be a comprehension check.

I really enjoyed the dice feature of the Smart Board software or Notebook software. The reason I enjoyed this feature is because I used it when I completed my SMART notebook software presentation. One of my slides was titled "Brainstorm for your topic", I used the dice feature and had it read "Movies, TV Shows, Family, etc.". Smart boards in general are a great asses to education. At my fathers community grade school, he has SMART boards in every classroom. While observing a classroom for a day, I sat through a lesson in which the students circle one thing to identify with one color and underline something else with another color. However, I am sorry I do not remember what the lesson was about but, that type of SMART board activity would be great for teaching pronouns and antecedents. The student could underline the pronoun in one color and circle the antecedent in another color. =FACS= The Smart board is a terrific tool in FACS classrooms because it allows for typically boring lessons to become interactive. For example, assembling a family tree becomes a hands-on class project when previously it was an individual task most students found tedious. In cooking lab classrooms, students can view a recipe and make their own modifications to it (such as flavors or nutrition value) on the board. The teacher then saves the recipes for future use. Most importantly, getting to use the Smartboard easily engages the students and that is important in every content area.

It is also comes in handy for FAC's when we are teaching world foods. Because there is a map that you can use to show the country and the flag of each country. This way we can integrate social studies in our classroom. As a fac's teacher we can also use this for showing more pictures of foods, houses and different topics for child development. And then we can use the writing tools to outline what we need to do to change these foods or point out a certain part in housing.

A lesson that integrates the smart board is designing a home layout and arranging furniture in the home using design images from the gallery. Students could use a grid as the background and create a floor plan, without having to erase lines every time they make a mistake. Also great websites for this are [|www.floorplanner.com] and [|www.armstrong.com/flooring/desin-tools.html]. The students can also draw lines to illustrate traffic patterns and can highlight spaces to identify the different zones such as the private, social and work zones.

When talking about career goals, the teacher could use the SMART Board to show relationships amongst different career clusters. Students could create flow charts showing the steps needed to reach a certain career goal. This is something that can be used a hundred different ways in a lot off different FACS classes.

When teaching a child development class, teachers can access the many programs available to elementary teachers. These would be great tools to use to show high school students how young children learn. The students could then make their own SMART board spread sheets and demonstrate them to the rest of the class. The teacher could go even further into this project by assigning specific age groups and learning styles (auditory, kinesthetic, or visual) to students.

Another great way to use the smart board in a FACS class is to have a picture of the sewing machine on the smart board. Then you could have the students come up and label the different parts of the sewing machine. This could be a great tool for review so when they have to take the test over the parts of the sewing machine. Students could also draw patterns for their garments on the SMART board. =Foreign Language=

Games[[image:technology-to-enhance-ed/Untitled.png align="right" caption="An example of a Jeopardy game using Smart Board software."]]
Having a Smart Board in a foreign language classroom would be beneficial because we would be able to incorporate many interactive games in the classroom. One example of this would be a virtual cross word puzzle. The class could work together to solve the puzzle and take turns writing their answers on the board. Smart Boards could be used in class to play internet games on websites like www.quia.com which would strengthen students' knowledge of the language. The Smart Board technology even makes it possible to games like Jeopardy in the classroom for a fun way to review with your students. More examples of Smart Board games for teaching foreign language can be found here.

Grammar Exercises
Another activity is using three different columns and having students place the correct verb tense in the correct column. This could also be used for many practice assignments in the classroom. Interactive flash cards could be used for an alternative way to review the students. SmartBoard does not have as many tools specifically meant for teaching Foreign Language, but many of the tools could be easily applied to a foreign language classroom.

Vocabulary
According to William C. Bradford, a former professor at Warrington College of Business, 65% of people are visual learners. The Smart Board technology can be used to provide students with pictures and movies that correspond with new vocabulary to increase learning in that large group of people. Students would have a great visual representation of what the vocabulary actually meant which would help them learn much more than merely reciting vocabulary in class.

=**Mathematics**= While teaching in my Block III classroom, which did not have a Smart Board, I realized how handy one would be to have in a classroom. The content I was teaching was geometry and graphing equations of lines. My classroom did have a graph board on one side of the white board, but that was nothing compared to the graph board which can be found on a Smart Board. Using Smart Board tools, straight and perfect lines can easily be drawn on a graph. If I would have had the equipment for Smart Boards available during my unit I feel that the students would have understood the material. When trying to find the intersection points of lines, free-handing lines on the white board created too many errors and too much confusion. Using the Smart Board for geometry lessons would not only be easier and quicker, but also more efficient. The Smart Board also has pattern blocks, geometric solids, and transformation tools that are great to use in a geometry lesson. The concepts can be modeled and manipulated on the Smart Board either by the teacher or the students.

For mathematics teachers, after creating a Smar Board lesson, I really like the interactive protractor. I think this is a great tool mathematics teachers can use in place of the old fashion, large, wooden protractor. The old wooden protractor is really hard to hold against the board and difficult to make precise measurements with because it's hard to hold in place. Using the interactive protractor on Smart Board makes angle measure lessons so much easier. You can use it to not only measure a particular angle already shown on the board, but you can also use the interactive protractor to create your own angle at a precise angle measure.

I think that the SMART Board is so helpful to mathematics teachers. From the interactive protractors and rulers that they have and also being able to pull up graph paper right away so quickly and easily is great. It takes less time than drawing a graph on the board, and you can save whatever you draw on their and are able to pull that up at a later time for students to refer back to or for students that are sick or absent on a given day. One of the neatest things that I found on the mathematics portion of the SMART Board software was the interactive die that could be used for probability lessons and to help generate random numbers without having students just shout out answers, but by actually "rolling" the dice on the board.

Smart Board works very nicely in math. It is very helpful to set up examples before teaching. It is also helpful because the pictures or images placed on a page or drawn on a page can be manipulated. This is much better than drawing and writing everything out on the chalkboard. Also, the students are so responsive to the Smart Board. Teaching with the Smart Board only makes the environment of the class more effective for learning. Getting the attention of all the students in math is very hard to do, but with the endless possibilities you can incorporate with the Smart Board it is possible to hit all styles of learning.

I think SMART Boards have much to offer the classroom. They allow students to physically interact with the material being taught, which is great for those kinesthetic learners. As a math teacher, however, I would not completely rely on the board for all my instruction just because I find it harder to write on than a regular whiteboard or chalkboard. I did find some great applications for the SMART Board for math teachers at http://teach.fcps.net/trt27/math.htm that I think I would use and that could be helpful for those teachers like me who are still learning how to use all the applications of the SMART Board. =**Music**= For music students, the SMART Board is perhaps the most helpful tool a teacher can have. In particular, it's easy to find staff paper and everything that goes with it (i.e. clefs, time signature, and, of course, notes). Using this, a teacher can create a melody directly on the Smart Board, whereas otherwise, he or she would have to buy staff paper, and then draw everything by hand, which can be extremely tedious work.

I think the Smart Board would best be used in a general music setting (which is usually elementary students) rather than an ensemble setting (like band or choir). In creating elementary general music lesson plans, I have used a lot of visual aids to help teach a concept. Instead of creating these visual aids with a poster board and other similar materials, the SmartBoard provides a way to create visual aids and save them to the computer. Having visual aids in this form is easier because I would not have to keep track them, not worry about losing them, and if I ever needed something in particular, I could just pull up the file and display it on the Smart Board or the computer. Using visual aids on the Smart Board is also a great way to get students involved with hands-on experiences. Instead of just projecting a visual aid, it could be something interactive for the students to use in order to help them learn musical concepts. Interactive visual aids can be used in many different classroom settings and content areas. Using the Smart Board in this way offers some of the best results. I have used the Smart Board for a general music lesson plans, some of which are the most successful.

Having the interaction in a different way can help motivate and excite the students about the subject. This also gives a different way to reach those students with different learning styles. The newer software for Smart Board has been a lot more helpful when it comes to using it in a music classroom. There are a lot of useful templates and a picture in the gallery on the program. Manuscript paper, symbols, notes, rests, and other musical notation can be found within the software. This can be a key tool in teaching the elementary or general music class.

I feel that the Smart Board may also be helpful in upper-level music classes, such as band and choir. If you work on ear training with your students at all, you may use the first 10 minutes of class and have students come up and use the ear trainer web 2.0 tool on MusicTheory.net. I would have my students come in and get their instruments out, and then I would call on certain students to come up and do a question or two on intervals. It may also be used as a game for a reward system or just to encourage them to practice their ear training at home. The smart board may also be used for rhythmic dictation. It is easy to have the manuscript paper and notes set up on the Smart Board and when going over a rhythmic dictation quiz, have a student come up and fill in the measure to see if they got it right. The organization of the Smar Board will save time, so that you may do these important lessons in your classroom without wasting too much precious rehearsal time.

The Smart Board does have a place in the collegiate setting. Whether in Theory class when explaining augmented sixth chords, or in Vocal Pedagogy class for explaining the anatomy of the throat, or even in a Music Appreciation class to explain the different sounds of the instruments. The Smart Board gives plenty of options for multiple types of music lessons. =Physical Education= Smart boards can definitely be used in the classroom. As a P.E. major, I think a Smart board could be an excellent tool when trying to demonstrate a particular play for a specific sport. All you have to do is go to the gallery and pick whichever background you want. For example, I demonstrated the squeeze play in baseball/softball and how to defend it. I was able to demonstrate the play by using the gallery and was able to record it. Plus this is a more exciting visual for students than just a chalkboard full of x's and o's. Smart Boards would also be great for teaching elementary P.E. because you can give the students more visual aid that they need.

I also am a P.E. major, and I think that a smart board would be great to be able to draw things out, so that you can actually show the proper technique. This would also be great, because you can assess your students by using the smart board. For example, you could have each student come up and they could write down one of the proper techniques that are used in softball. Smart boards can be even more useful before a game. You can upload video of the opposition to watch and then use Notebook software to break down the opponents plays and explain possible strategies and game plans //before// you play the opposing teams.

Smart boards are a great tool for the classroom. As a P.E. major, I think that I could and should utilize smart boards for my classroom (if they are available). It's a great visual tool for the students. I will be able to do many new things with smart board. I can use some of the applications for better explaining a skill, play, technique, etc. I can allow my students to become familiar with them. Let the students interact with the smart board. I can take attendance by having them go to the board and drag their name to their squad. I can also assign projects for them to present. They can use different fields as backgrounds, and present on a sport they are assigned. They can become creative with smart boards. Smart boards will help expand the students' knowledge of technology.

As a future Physical Educator, I am overwhelmed with the countless opportunities to implement technology, particularly the Smart Board, into teaching. The Smart Board aids in accommodating to various learning and communication styles, such as auditory and visual. Not only does the utilization of the Smart Board benefit student learning, but also enhances classroom management and organization. One way the Smart Board, if implemented properly, encourages student learning is by actively involving the students in regards to instruction. For example, the Smart Board provides countless galleries which the students can use to create their own plays in basketball or football. In addition, the sport backgrounds such as the basketball and soccer ones can be used to explain the player positions and offensive and defensive strategies. In regards to proper techniques, instead of giving the students a handout with the techniques written out, the students can collaborate and write on the Smart Board their ideas. This will facilitate classroom discussion and allow the students to feel apart of the class.

When using a Smart board during practice, use the Notebook software to show a designed play and allow the student's to move the players according to the play so there can be a visual for the student-athletes. This is better than having them stand on a court or field and yelling out to the team what the new play is. This gives the students an overhead view and even allows them to make modifications or ask questions about changes during the Smart board practice.

Another plus to Smart Boards in a PE classroom is that they are quick! If the teacher had a quick review of vocabulary up on the board them it would take very little time to review so that students could go on with the skills and physical part of the class. This is great opposed to a worksheet or other ways that take more time to use for reviewing. As a P.E. teacher I really like that I can put a timer into my presentation and use it. I think that this is a great thing to add to a heart rate lesson. I would show how to take your heart rate, and than the students can use the timer to take their own.

In Physical Education the use of technology and computers is very limited, but Smart board gives me a way to incorporate technology in my classroom and interest students in technology.

The SMART Board is an excellent tool for not only basic core subjects such as math, science, and history, but also physical education/health and coaching. I was first introduced to SMART Boards during my junior year of high school when my varsity basketball coach utilized it in the locker room. Instead of the conventional chalkboard that so many us were used to, it was a nice change to see plays, diagrams, and key points for the game listed on an interactive SMART Board. Already being a part of the coaching staff in the Farmington School District, I have also heard rumors of smaller size SMART Boards which would also be a wonderful aspect to all athletic teams. =**Social Studies**= In Social Studies, the SMART Board can be used in a variety of ways. It makes showing videos fairly easy. Also, time lines can become enjoyable as the students can come up the the board and place the events with the correct dates themselves. The SMART Board really promotes activity in the classroom.

The use of the Smart Board would be a great tool for Social Studies teachers as it helps make the topics in history and government more interactive for students. Often times students considered themselves disconnected to history and Social Studies classes in general. The Smart Board helps me as a Social Studies teacher to bring a topic, such as Civil War Reconstruction or the election process, into a different view and makes such topics more interesting to the students. The more students are interested in the topic, the better chance they will be engaged in the material and the Smart Board can be a great tool to help in this task. I hope that I can use this in the future as this new technology can possibly help my students become better decision-makers in our society.

This technology can really promote interaction in the classroom. There are so many uses for it. Create a Venn Diagram and have students write in their answers. In a collaborative activity, each groups questions could be posted on the Smart board. They could fill in their answers as they find them. This will also the whole class to visually review the results of the activity. You can also link games from the internet that allows the class as a whole to play, or you could divide them into teams and they could play against each other. The Smart board software comes with maps of the United States, individual states, other countries, political, physical, and just plain outlines, or outlines with the capital marked with a red dot, and you can create numerous activities with these images or you can just use them for a reference during a lesson. After I am more comfortable with the technology, I would like to allow students to create lessons using the Smart board. This would be a project that would increase retention of the knowledge, but also it is sometimes more effective to have students learn from each other. The Smart board allows you to use a variety of media for you lesson such as audio, video, graphics, and games which allow student interaction. It is especially helpful when providing maps and geography tools to students. Their are many great websites that are great geographic tools such as [|GEO SPY]- http://www.missmaggie.org/geospy_files/geospy.html which allows students to find map locations as part of a simulation. This game can be very additive and is available on facebook. Students can compete for high scores [|TRAVEL IQ].

The thing that i like about the Smart Board in the Social Studies classroom is that it makes it very easy to organize different kinds of material. The organization and presentation of different materials in Social Studies is very important not only because it helps create a better understanding of a person or event, but it also engages the students.

During the course of this semester, I was extremely excited to work with a Smart Board. Unfortunately, I did not have one in my classroom during my field experience, but was however able to use one during this class. I enjoyed creating the assignment both using the basic Smart Board and integrating United Streaming as it allowed me to realize how I could use it when teaching social studies. The Smart Board can be beneficial by using interactive maps, time lines, videos, pictures, and concepts maps. I hope during my future teaching experiences that a Smart Board will be available for me to capitalize on its positives in social studies.

I liked using the smart board in Social Studies. I started teaching my lesson with the smart board. I did a review and had the students tell me the answers. Once they answered the question I pulled the page down to reveal the answer. They seemed to like the variety since my teacher never uses it. It is very easy to use so anyone can use it. =**Science**= A SmartBoard in a science classroom is a gift to both teacher, students, and the administration. In biology classrooms, every class does at least one dissection each year. For most biology classrooms, the number of dissections is closer to four or five. Purchasing organs, tissues, or complete organisms for dissection is not cheap. However, one way to wave some of these costs is by doing the dissections on the Smart Board. Complete dissections can be found online or ordered and loaded onto your computer. Then, teachers can have students come to the Smart Board and do the dissection themselves. There are five other uses for the Smart Board in a science classroom shown below. The first use is to create your own quizzes, sorting tables, games and flash activities to achieve greater class interaction into your lesson plan. The second use is to label plants and animals and their parts using the SMART Board by either having the organism and labeling the parts or by moving the parts to the correct location on the organism. A teacher could also record data from class science projects or lab assignments by writing it on the SMART Board, and use the SMART Board to create tables and figures displaying data trends you can compare and analyze as a class. Take the class on virtual field trips using videos of locations around the world, the inside of a cell or the inside of the human body. Lastly, one could also use the software to display a realistic night sky and help students locate constellations and learn about the planets in our solar system. The Smart Board also allows videos to be incorporated into the lesson. The Notebook software has videos of cell movement and other aspects of science. There are also different interactive activities like helping Bob breath and labeling skeletons. The amoeba below is similar to the amoeba video that is on the software. Amoeba cell picture

For some excellent web resources for lessons using the Smart Board in a science classroom look below:
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=Using Notebook software without a Smart board:= I very much wanted to use my video Notebook lesson with my Block III students (in an English classroom), but unfortunately, did not have a Smart board. However, I was determined to use my lesson anyway, so what I did was ended up getting a laptop and a projector, setting them up in class, and then actually projecting my lesson on the wall. (You are able to borrow a laptop and portal projector from the IRTC lab) I only had one very interactive part where the students would have been able to write on the smart board, but instead I taped up butcher block paper and let them write on that, taking it down when they were finished. It wasn't quite the same as the Smar tboard, but it wasn't bad. It just goes to prove, where there's a will, there's a way!

I never really got a hold on the smart boards. I had a really hard time figuring out how to navigate the program and struggled with both assignments where we used the program. However, I think if I had the time to sit down and focus on it I could do some cool stuff with it. The only problem is that in this part of the state most school districts aren't financially able to provide their teachers with this type of tool. I struggled with this in my Block III class, where my cooperating teaching had one computer, nothing else. If I have the available resources to use a Smart board in my classroom I could see myself using it.