SMART Boards

    This week I was able to explore SMART boards through the workshop we had on Wednesday. I had very little experience with SMART boards prior to this workshop. We had a couple in some of the classrooms at my old high school, but I never saw them used. I did see a SMART board used once in my field placement last year though, but the only thing my teacher used it for was as a projector screen. Because of my limited experience with SMART boards I used to think they were pointless and that they really weren't that special because I never saw what all the different elements they contained. Through this workshop though I have learned that there are THOUSANDS of ways you can use a SMART board and that there are endless possibilities to use it in a classroom. A SMART board is a touch screen 'white board' where you can use the special pens to draw things or you can use your fingers to drag and select things. There are thousands of applications that comes with the SMART board technology, such as game templates, like Jeopardy, different fonts and pictures, instruments that you can play or listen to the sounds they make, spinners, dice, maps, a stopwatch, and even an application that allows you to dissect a frog! You can even go onto the internet with your SMART board and you can draw, highlight or write on a website, take a picture of it and it gets saved to the SMART board to be used over and over again. This tool is one of the coolest pieces of technology that I have used and experienced with this semester and hope that I can use one of these in my classroom in the future.