SMARTer Lessons = SMARTer Students

Even though I knew the session wouldn't entirely relate to me, I headed to a workshop about Smartboards geared toward elementary-school teachers. By the end of the presentation, I was just as inspired as others in the group, mainly because I took the advice of Tammi Sisk, Fairfax County Public Schools technology specialist for elementary school, to heart. Smartboards will become your educational tool of choice if you just "get in and dig."

No doubt, it takes persistence to make a commitment to using a Smartboard regularly. There is a big learning curve -- going over the basic tools took almost a half-hour -- but once you get over the hump, to the point you can be creative, the opportunities are numerous. Here are just a few insights I gleaned, in hopes of inspiring you in the same way:

Accessories for Everyone
Senteo: Smartboard has released a student-response system that can be used for both informal feedback and formal assessment. Immediate feedback can be used to judge whether a concept should be discussed further, and long-term student-specific data can be exported to Excel, to be manipulated for standards-based grading.
Notebook 10: This software update can be downloaded from Smart Technologies, but you will have to provide the serial number from a Smartboard. Some new features include a shape pen, which allows you to free-hand draw a shape then turn it into a precise figure; a table tool, which allows you to create and manipulate tables instead of copying them from Word; and a magic pen, which allows you zoom (by drawing a square), darken excess information (by drawing a circle), and write slowly disappearing text (by using a pen).
Notebook Interactive Viewer: Students can download this program from Smart Technologies on their own computers to view teacher Notebook files.

Tips for Everyone
Recorder: To add voice and action to your files, you can use the recorder while you are teaching. Then these files can be e-mailed to parents to help their children with homework, prepared ahead of time for substitutes, and/or uploaded to Blackboard for absent students.
Orientation: The accuracy of the touch works on release, so it is better to slide your finger to the point and lift instead of tapping. If you still aren't getting enough accuracy, you can adjust the number of points for orientation.
Pens: When using interactive tools from the gallery, you can pick up a pen to choose a different color for a different user. This helps differentiate between a student attempt and a teacher correction.
Gallery: This portion of the Notebook software contains photos, clip art, movie clips, backgrounds, and flash animations sorted by subject area and tagged through search terms. In general, these files will be more reliable than ones copied and pasted from the Internet; if you do use files from online, you should save them to your computer and attach them to your Notebook file.

Tips for Elementary School Teachers
Props: Use a paintbrush to reveal a picture hidden under a white overlay drawn with pen, perhaps to introduce a topic or reveal an answer, or have students use a koosh ball or fly swatter to pick activities, which basically are hyperlinks to other pages in the Notebook file.
Resources: Many Web sites work great with Smartboards, such as Starfall, Internet4Classrooms, BBC, and Taggalaxy. Add-on downloads are available at a cost from Smart Technologies, such as SMART Speller and Number Cruncher.

Tips for Elementary School Math
Infinite Clone: This choice under the down arrow locks an object into place, so dragging off the object creates a copy instead; this works well for counting visually with base-ten blocks.
Ordering: This choice under the down arrow acts like shuffling cards, allowing objects to stack; this works well for isolating the hundreds, tens, and ones place in a number.

Tips for Elementary School Language Arts
Colors: Manipulating the color of text and backgrounds can show halves of words then the entire word; this works well for teaching phonetic blends and compound words.
Spellcheck: After scanning a student's work into the notebook, students can identify misspelled words, use a white pen to "white out" the error, rewrite the word, then use the "recognize as" command under the down arrow to see possible spelling options.

More Smartboard training will be offered this year, I imagine, but what I realized most from the session is that the best training comes from developing your own relationship with your Smartboard. Start by determining whether you're a person who likes to use the pen or a finger to write, for example. Then try one trick at a time, perhaps one of those above. One success might motivate you to "dig in" further.