Smart Response

Imagine getting instant results on a test or on a particular problem. The Smart Response units from Smart Technoloty can do just that. It gives the teachers the ability to instantly track results and gain immediate insight as to who's understanding the concept and who's not understanding it. They are wireless remotes or clickers that the students use to choose answers.

A graph can immediately be displayed after each answer is scored to determine the percentage of right answers to incorrectly answered questions. Just by touching the graph on the Smartboard the teacher can view which students answered correctly and which students did not. This can aid the teacher in determining what needs to be retaught or not and to whom.

The Possibilities Are Endless

One good idea is to write sentences that have mistakes(DOL) and have the students come up and make corrections. When the students know that they are going to be able to come up to the interactive board they pay extra attention. The students who are not chosen to come up to the board can be making corrections on their whiteboards. That way everyone is working and have to time to be fooling around.

Any time a child can come up to the interactive whiteboard and interact with it is a plus.

Here you will be "Killing many birds with one stone" The child is dragging the shape to its name. The child is not only learning the name of the shape, but how it looks and how it is spelled. You are also addressing the kinesthetic and visual learning styles of the children.

Here the children are learning the long and short vowels. They are classifying the words by putting them in groups of long and short vowels. Again, "Killing two birds with one stone".

Whiteboard

I was walking by a fellow teacher's classroom and I saw her using her SmartBoard as a whiteboard. She was teaching the students the different ways they can read or use the plus sign. She then went on to a new page and did the same thing for the minus sign. Then she continued to read to the students different math problems that included the words and the students had to tell her what the problem was asking them to do (add or subtract). She would switch back and forth to both pages.

The students love to come up to write on the Smartboard and also use it as a whiteboard. At the beginning it takes lots of practice until they become comfortable using it as a writing device. If they make a mistake while writing, they can easily pick up the eraser and erase.

An advantage of using the Smartboard as a whiteboard is that you can save the pages you create and open them up on a later date for review. Imagine how much time that saves!

This week I was teaching phonics to an intervention group of students who are for the most part new to this country or their fluency is very low. That particular day I was teaching them the oo sound as in the word good. I used the interactive white board to display the words with the 00 sound as well as pictures that represented the words.

The students then went up to the white board and wrote the words when only given the picture of the words. The students liked this very much. An advantage of this is the fact that the pictures were previously placed on the lesson. They were only a click away. And, if we needed to go back to their writing, that was also a click away. Compared to the regular white board, where the students writing would need to be erased so that another student could come up to the board, the interactive whiteboard adds a new blank page with just a click.
If you want to play educational games with the students, you could do that on the interactive board as well. You just go to a website that has educational games, display the games on the interactive white board and the students come up to the board to move things around and push buttons. How fun is that!

Advantages of Interactive Whiteboard Use

There are many advantages of using interactive whiteboards in your lessons. The first year I used an interactive whiteboard in my third grade math lessons, my students' state scores went up dramatically compared to the previous year where I hadn't used it.

One thing that I noticed right away was that the students were totally focused on the lesson. The interactive white board is very bright and I added colors and images to the lesson pages which made it appealing to the students.

Another thing that I noticed was that less time was wasted because I did not have to write the problems on the board. The problems were just one click away. Yes, I had to put in time to create the lesson pages, but it paid off during the lesson. Because less time was wasted, it gave the students less time to fool around.

I made the lessons interactive, where the students could come up and try the problems on the interactive board. They were very excited about that.