Thursday, August 2, 2007

Smartboards

After reading a blog on another site it reminded me of Smartboards and that maybe there are some teachers out there that don't know what they are. If you are familiar than you know they are pretty cool. I was lucky to have one in my room when I taught fourth grade at another school. This past year I taught 2nd grade and wrote a grant with the technology director and the fourth grade teacher and purchased a Smartboard to be shared. You can hook up your laptop or any computer to the Smartboard and bring up an endless supply of interactive educational sites for the children to do some cool activities on. My favorite is math and there are so many sites that make learning fun and interesting without paper and pencil. The children are so engaged in the activities and they can't wait to go up and manipulate the board. My wish is that we will be able to purchase more boards so that they are permanently set up in teachers' rooms. I found it tedious to go gather the board, the projector, the cords, and a laptop with the program installed. When I taught fourth grade it was mounted on the wall and it was much easier to use. Currently our 6th Grade Science teacher has a smartboard mounted in his room and he uses it everyday. That is the ideal situation. Check out the Smartboard web site if you get a chance to see what these boards can do.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Smartboards are pretty neat. I don't have one, but I did get to use one in a class I took last year. They certainly are an amazing tool.