Smartboards! The students call them Dumbboards...

Smartboards are awesome, unless they are aggravating. There are good and bad elements to the Smartboards.

Pros:

You can leave your laptop and work directly on the board. This eliminates walking back and forth between board and computer.

You can use your finger to type, write, color, erase, click, right-click, double click, open, close, minimize, spotlight, highlight, shade, rotate, twist, save, photograph, and otherwise manipulate materials.

Students like to use it and have a lot of fun with it. They can manipulate text and images and writing.

Programs like Internet Explorer, Microsoft Notebook and Microsoft Powerpoint and Microsoft Word take on whole new meanings when you can write directly on the websites, pages, slides, or documents. You can annotate, edit, and decorate notes with relative ease.

Videos and sound are dramatically more awesome than any DVD/TV/VCR combo you've ever used before. Crisp pictures and sound.

Cons:

The setup of my Smartboard requires cords galore. The USB cord coils on the floor, the speaker cord is barely long enough, and I have an extension cord trailing across the entire room to plug in the laptop, projector, and anything else I need.

Any slight motion of either the Smartboard or the projector requires a realignment of the two. Students accidentally bump the projector and all goes awry. Realignment tends to lose the class for a few seconds.

Preparing awesome lessons on the Smartboard requires extra prep, which usually takes quite a bit of time.

Sometimes it is hard to click on tiny elements of the website, like the x to close a window. That requires much precision.

Conclusion:

It's worth using if you can put the time in. My classes like it, I like it, it makes things funny and engaging, especially when done right.

Visual Literacy

Today we spoke of visual literacy, not necessarily literacy having to do with words, but instead pictures. In Microsoft Word, I created a poem based on an image displayed in the front of the classroom. I then illustrated my poem in Microsoft Paint. The idea of having students write material based on scientific images intrigues me, I wonder if my students are motivated enough to actually do it if I asked them to. Usually as bonus points on tests, I have them write haikus about the material we have been focusing on. I know that when I ask them to draw, it rarely goes well - on our museum field trip, we had space for students to sketch what they saw, and those spaces were the ones most frequently left blank. I do have students who like to draw though - some of them have a hard time putting their pencils down.

We also learned geography through Japanese art today. This was an interesting exercise - we looked at pictures to determine the climate and geography of Japan. I liked how we used art instead of photographs to learn this. I definitely want to try this with Earth Science as we start landscapes soon. My only hesitation is that the photos might be difficult to see from the back of the room.