Thursday, December 5, 2013
SMART Boards
After the initial WOW I had about SMART Boards, the feeling wore off and I am just left with the question of how beneficial are they really. Don’t get me wrong! I would love to have one in my future classroom but like everything else, it really depends on how you use it. I am aware that with this technology my life as a teacher will be easier. It will help me bring multi-media into my lessons and help me do interesting things that I cannot do with PowerPoint. The SMART Board resources in the internet are abundant and I can use them to make the content more dynamic and clear. I think the smart board technology is relatively easy to use and helps accommodate many learning styles at the same time.
However, the SMART Board is just a tool and as such, it is how you use this tool that counts. When trying to emphasize nonlinguistic representations of content, we must make sure not to clutter slides and choose relevant, focused visuals. I don’t have a lot of experience with SMART Boards but it seems to me that it will help reinforcing the material more than explaining the reasoning behind it. In other words, I don’t know if it will help students focus attention on the “why” behind the correct or incorrect response. This is where teacher intervention is necessary and cannot be replaced by software regardless of how smart it is! The software cannot read students the way we can. Again, don’t misinterpret what I am saying. I think that proper usage of this technology can be very beneficial in the classroom but again…the key word is proper usage. I firmly believe it is more about the teaching than the “tool”.
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I understand and agree with the point you are making here, Ximena. The experience a teacher has using the technology accessible through the SMART Board matters more than the PowerPoint slideshows that are created for it, because it is simply much too easy for a teacher to clutter their slides with useless visuals which results in confused students. While I firmly believe that teachers can begin to understand this technology only if they teach themselves how to use it long before they actually use it in the classroom, it amazes me that some teachers choose to dive right in and use it without any knowledge of how to use it. In these cases, the teachers tend to be just as confused as the students are. As you say, it is more about the teacher doing the teaching rather than the tool the teacher is using.
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