Smart Board!

Smart Board

 Smart Board is a very good pedagogic tool that you can use in the classroom. A Smart Board is a digital interactive whiteboard. You can use it to write on it. It is easy to underline the most important parts. The written can be made by a computer or by your hand or a pupil. For example, you can use it to put up a lyric, a short part of a story or a sentence on the smart board. The pupils can then take out the different clause elements, the head and the determiners or modifiers or take out the different word classes such as all the nouns, all the verbs and so on. For example if you are working with verbs in the clause then you can underline all the verbs that the pupils say is a verb. Furthermore the pupils can discuss about what is happening in the text or discuss a new word that they do not understand.

 

Moreover there are a lot of pre-made activities and lessons that you can use where the pupils can practice in different things. The activities and lessons can be found for all the different subjects such as, English, mathematics, Swedish, technology and so on. The activities and lessons are free resources that the Smart Technologies are providing with, which means that you can search for them. Furthermore other teachers put in activities, lessons and ideas that they have done with their pupils. Moreover it is easy to make different activities and lessons on the Smart Board by yourself.    

There are many ways that you can use the Smart Board for. For example, you can print something on it, you can change what is printed to text box, you can move items and objects on the screen and you can insert videos and pictures and so on. Also there is a record that you can use. It is also available to record in a video. For example, you can let the pupils’ record themselves while they are communicating with each other or when they are reading out loud or when they are giving easy instructions for how to do something such as how to put on a sweater. Afterward they can listen on how the pronunciation went and how their individual communicative skills are so they can practice in the parts that they need to. Of course they will listen at the recordings by themselves while the other pupils are doing something else. To quote to Brady Phillips “Ask not what your SMART Board can do; ask instead what you can do with your SMART Board.”

According to Brady Phillips ”Students learn by doing. Having teachers get out of the way and let the students use the SMART Board and Notebook software to demonstrate understanding of a concept or problem should be at the center of pedagogy.” Therefore it is important to let the pupils try by themselves and let them practice on the same things more than one time. Jeremy Harmer wrote about how important it is for the pupils to repeat the things that they learn, because the things that they have learn then goes from their short-term to their long-term memories.

 
The Smart Board is a very useful pedagogy tool especially if the classroom only has one computer, because you can use it with the whole class, in half class or with small groups. The classroom where I had my VFU had only one computer in the classroom, although they had a Smart Board that was frequently used. I really do recommend it, because it is a fun and easy way to use when you teach pupils in English.

// Maria-Pia Jansson