November 14, 2009

SMART Board Lessons

Up until very recently, teaching and learning have been done in a relatively static manner with very little interaction with the material being taught. With the unveiling of the web's second version, web 2.0, classroom instruction has changed forever. Students now have the ability to be working on a "classroom" assignment with other students from around the globe. Teachers now have the opportunity to collaborate with other teachers not just from their school or district but from other states and countries. With the advancement of this new way of interacting with information came the development of the SMART Board, a dynamic tool which allows students to interactively participate in their learning. For most teachers, this exciting tool is something they can only hope to use in the future, but for the teachers here at SMS...the future is now. The purpose of this blog entry is not to teach you how to use the SMART Board. You will need to complete that part of your journey on your own (keep in mind that there are now several teachers in the building who have received the SMART training). The purpose of this blog is to offer you resources to consult in order to make lesson planning with the SMART Board much easier, avoiding the dreaded "reinvention of the wheel" scenario. The most comprehensive website that I use for "borrowing" lessons is SMART Exchange. On this website you can search for lessons that other teachers have created and submitted for general use by entering some keywords into the search box. Alternatively, you can click on your subject and search through the lessons this way as well. It is very easy to navigate and even allows you to search by curriculum standards by clicking on the "Standards-Correlated Lessons" tab. What I like most about this website is that it shows you a quick snapshot on the right hand side of the most downloaded files. This is a great place to find lessons that are applicable to any curriculum. Eventually when you start developing your own lessons using the SMART software, you can even upload your own lessons on this site to share with others!

In order to use these files you will need to download them from the websites above and then open them on a computer with a connected SMART Board. You may choose to download these files onto a flash drive so they are more portable and readily available to you. If you choose to go one step farther, you can edit these lessons using the Smart software that is installed on all of the teacher computers in the school.

Well that's all for now. Best of luck to you as you move from "Classroom 1.0" to "Classroom 2.0" and believe me when I tell you that your students will thank you for it. Stay tuned for the next installment of the SMS Technology Integration blog which will focus on the topic of "Google Apps".

Below this post is a text box for comments where you can leave a thought or share other resources that you have found to be useful in planning with the SMART Board. Collaborate away!!!

1 comment:

Mr. Schneider said...

I'd love to see more about how to use a smartboard to connect with the "outside" world.