Smartboard, more like rightboard

Interactive whiteboards are becoming more common in the classrooms. How do you feel they enhance teaching and learning? Was the technology difficult for you to learn to use? What are the pros and cons to having one installed in your classroom? Think of some lesson plans you wrote in the past. How would you incorporate the Smartboard when teaching that content?

Whiteboards are becoming a key tool in the classroom I enjoy working with them very much. They definitely help keep the students focused on the lesson. The whiteboards also allow the students to be much more active and participate in the lesson. The students become more involved and take an active role in their learning- this can help build the students understanding and confidence when it comes to a new concept. The whiteboards are very easy to learn because they can work with existing programs such as powerpoint or youtube. The whiteboard itself is basically a dry erase board but the marker never runs out of ink. The whiteboard is usually pretty easy to work, the only problem might be that you need to either download the smart notebook software, or your internet isn’t working.

Having a whiteboard in the class is great because it allows the students to become involved, it allows the students to expand their ideas on the lesson, it allows the students to try new things, and it helps to build real world connections. But at the same time the lessons taught without the smartboard will need to be comparable to the smartboard lessons which could mean extra planning for the teacher. There also runs the risk of having the smartboard broken in the classroom. Some teachers also only use the smartboard as a game/distraction which may be a downfall to some lessons.

The previous lesson/content areas would be fun to include the smartboard in. For art the students could match/identify artists to paintings or do actual drawing on the board. For music the students could compose and then play the music back. They could also help create their own music video. For math the students could learn fractions by dividing and building wholes. For history there are maps and matching activities. For language arts there is dice to help build words, and also there are different pages to have students write on the lines on the smartboard. For science there are ways to incorporate different images, microscopes and movies.