SmartBoard Technology Made Easy by TeacherTube

SmartBoards are becoming more and more common in classrooms in afluent districts - and even some target districts, as grants are given to teachers to try and increase testing scores. When I graduated high school, almost every classroom was fitted with a SmartBoard, and I'm sure, by now, every classroom has a SmartBoard. I vaguely recall teachers chatting about professional development seminars and weekend sessions dedicated to the use of a SmartBoard, but only my math teachers used them. Even in my science classes, which had a long list of math problems and the possibility of videos, diagrams and other interesting things to be added to a lesson with the use of the SmarBoard, there was very little acknowledgement of the board being there.

So, why SmartBoards? You can save data sets to them as you write on a document. You can connect them to your files to show students, play movies, and finally get rid of overhead projectors with transparencies. Erasing the board is no longer a necessity, as the digital documents seem to scroll on forever, and this is a much quicker way of keeping track of how far in the lesson each class went. I found this video on TeacherTube which gives a basic, but useful, overview of how to operate a SmartBoard.

Although this covers the basics, I can start to see how a SmartBoard would be used in an English classroom. I could upload a piece of the assigned reading and annotate it with the class; I could then save the annotation to be given to students later as part of their notes. Being able to use the SmartBoard as a projector screen would be great during class! How interesting would it be to show Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, while have the uploaded book pages next to the movie. This way, instead of forcing students to look down at their books and then back up to the screen for the evaluation process of see how the lines are read, it would all be provided and lower the levels of distraction. As a time saver, I can upload students documents and/or my notes to model for the class.

TeacherTube in general is a great website! There are lessons, documents, videos and audio on the website. Even just clicking around, there are endless ways to capitalize on what the website provides! I would really suggest that any educator at least look at it and evaluate how they can use it in their classrooms or lesson plans.