Interactive Whiteboards, digital whiteboards and SMARTboards all motivate students to interact actively in learning. As a teaching tool it can be used in many ways in a teacher’s lessons throughout the day. This article provides smart ways to use the SMART board.
Once the technology needed (the interactive whiteboard itself, smartboard notebook software, a digital projector and a computer) for the SMARTboard is in your classroom, you can begin using this media in many ways.
1. Sign in for attendance
Students love the colors on the writing tools. Using a background of a notebook page, or a numbered table, the students sign their names on the Smartboard as they enter the classroom. This allows for a quick attendance check, especially if the lines are numbered. Place a star in a blank line for the student who is star for the week.
2. Daily Message
Write a message for the day leaving blanks for missing letters. Have students write this message in their notebooks while waiting for their turn to fill in the blanks. Use one color to fill in all the vowels and one color for consonants. As the year goes on the messages can have more missing letter combinations to fill in.
3. Daily Quote
Insert a daily quote for the day in the top corner of the SMARTboard. In the educator resources folder, there are videos of famous speeches in multimedia resources. You can present a the video and have the students hear the words “I have a dream..” then guess the speaker. They can hear JFK plan to have a man land on the moon.
4. Do Now Activity
Type a brief daily “Do Now” activity on the SMARTboard. This could be a simple math problem, an estimation of an amount or size of an object, or a list of the 5 top fruits and vegetables to eat daily. Insert a notebook page with a blank 2 column table on the SMARTboard. The students can write their answer, estimate or list entry in column 1 and then their name in column 2.
5. Art Board
During a free period or an indoor recess, insert a background picture on a SMARTboard notebook page for students to add their drawings to. There are backdrops such as a stage, an ocean scene, or paintings by famous artists such as Vincent Van Gogh. There are also pieces of tangrams to move around to create sculptures, shapes to trace, and grids of dots to create drawings on. Students love simply to see their signature written on the brick wall background for graffiti art.