Advantages of SmartBoards

For my 20% project, I honestly am struggling how to deepen my project and its development. Last blog post, I talked about some disadvantages of SmartBoards in classrooms. For this blog post, I am going to talk about some advantages of SmartBoards. I have talked some about SmartBoards and their place in classrooms. I personally think they are very helpful. Recently in EDIT 2000, we had two people come to class and show us how a SmartBoard could be used in a classroom. There were many different things you could do. For example, one thing you could do was use a program on the SmartBoard where you dissect a frog by "cutting" along certain lines on the board. This allows schools who may no have the funds to provide actual frogs for dissection to still see what it is like to dissect a frog. There are also different templates on the SmartBoard that allow teachers to create a more interactive classroom. SmartBoards allow students to be hands-on in the classroom. Students can come to the board and use the features of the Board to complete learning tasks. For example, if you were a lower school teacher and were teaching students about money and change and how to create change, the SmartBoard has a program where you have stacks of quarters, nickels, dimes, and pennies. Students can drag and drop this money to create certain amounts of money. For example, if they had to great $0.51, they could drag two quarters and a penny into a box. They could do this to continue practicing making money.

Another great thing about a SmartBoard is that is it especially helpful to both visual and auditory learners. It is pretty self explanatory how the Board is helpful to visual learners. Students can look at the Board and see its interactive features. Also, when students are working at the Board, the other students can learn by looking at what those students are doing. The SmartBoard also has features that allow it to talk out loud through videos and presentations, etc. So in this way, auditory learners are benefiting from the Board being able to speak out loud.

I found one article about interactive whiteboards that I thought was very interesting. The article itself had to be purchased in order to view the entire thing, but I was able to read two pages of it and found some very useful information in just these two  pages. These two pages of the article can be found here. This article mentions that "these tools (referring to interactive whiteboards) provide teachers and students the tools for creativity, innovation, and engagement." This quote stuck out to me because it is exactly what we have been talking about this year in EDIT 2000. We have talked so much about how to integrate creativity, innovation, and student engagement in classrooms, and this quote says that interactive whiteboards do just that! How cool! This article also mentions that "interactive whiteboards use is increasing across colleges and universities as teacher preparation programs recognize the usefulness and efficiency of the tools." 

Another short article I found included benefits of using SmartBoards for both teachers and students. This article can be found here. As you can see in the article, it lists bullet points of positive impacts SmartBoards have on students. Some of these include lessened student distractions in class because they are paying attention to interactive learning and students become highly engaged in lessons when participating in SmartBoard activities. I find it interesting that there are few articles online that I can find that talk about negatives of SmartBoards in a classroom. Everything seems to be positive, which is great! I think SmartBoards are a great tool that can greatly increase student learning. I think it would be interesting to explore whether or not SmartBoards are just a trend right now and will eventually be replaced by iPads or other technology tools, or if they will continue to be placed in classrooms. 

My 20% Project Driving Question

I had a hard time coming up with my driving question for m 20% Project. This entire EDIT class is devoted to teaching how to use technology in a classroom, and since I want to be a teacher, this class perfectly fits my interests and needs. So when trying to come up with a topic for my driving question, I basically wanted to do a project summarizing everything we are going to learn this semester. I had a hard time narrowing my interests in classroom technology into something specific. I considered doing something sports related because I love sports. However, I decided that it was best if I use this project to my best advantage and choose something that I can actually refer to later in my career and use in the future. I thought about how I could narrow down researching technology in the classroom, and then decided that I needed to pick one specific type of technology that was in a classroom and try and go from there. I chose a SmartBoard because I think it will be the type of technology I will use most in my classroom (if there is one in my class). Then, to get even more specific, I thought about what I could research in order to find out more about a SmartBoard and its use in the classroom. So finally I decided that my driving question will be:

What are some advantages and disadvantages of using a SmartBoard in the classroom?

When I researched "SmartBoard," many different things came up. Most of them were positive things, like lesson plans using a SmartBoard or how to use a SmartBoard in a bunch of different ways. I did find a few articles about disadvantages of SmartBoards, but even these articles contained some sort of positive information about SmartBoards in a classroom.