There is a SmartBoard in the House

In February, I wrote about Interactive Whiteboards- Which? How? What?. Since then our school’s area representative Erik Shafer has commented on the blog post. This week I finally was able to set up a time for him to come to Jacksonville to give us a presentation. We had asked our head and assistant head of school to stop by when they could spare a minute and listen in on the presentation. Other teachers as they had a planning period or a few minutes to spare also stopped by informally.

Erik did a fantastic ( ) job in showing us the capabilities of the SmartBoard. While he was setting up the demo board, I talked to him about how our school was working hard towards technology integration, not just using tools as glorified digital versions of the the tool they had used for years (ex. PowerPoints as “high tech” overhead projectors, word processing as the “technology” version of the written book report, or encyclopedia Brittanica as the substitute for the the paper version). We needed were not interested too much in the hardware (the board) itself, but how it would change the ways teachers teach and the way students learn.

We are very grateful to Erik for his patience of starting several times over again, when a new set of teachers walked in. Wednesdays are our busy planning day , which worked out perfectly since it allowed quiet a few grade levels to rotate in and out during that planning time with TechConnect. The most important time was when we pulled two Kindergarteners and two First graders in and watch their faces when they were allowed to “try” the board out. The excitement in their eyes said it all.

We were REALLY excited when Erik offered to “loan” the SmartBoard to us until next week. Wow, what an opportunity… The news “There is a SmartBoard in the House“, spread pretty fast. More and more teachers poked their heads in to take a look and even dragged their assistants in.

I did not waste any time hooking the board to the laptop on one of our projector carts. All it took was a USB cable that created the connection to the laptop, which also provided the power back to the board. I then

1. downloaded the SmartBoard Notebook software
2. turned the projector on
3. pushed two buttons simultaneously on the board tray
4. calibrated 9 points on the board

and I was in business of playing around and getting used to the location of the buttons.

Here are some other interesting info that Erik presented to us regarding the :

SmartBoard:

• provides free software upgrade for as long as you own the SmartBoard
• gives free professional development training to you as long and as often as you wish for the life of your product ( 1/2 days, full days, two days)
• provides free technical support
• access to all Smart Board resources and lesson plans
• all teachers AND students are able to download the software onto the computers (school and home) as long as the school at least owns 1 SmartBoard

Once I arrived at home this afternoon, I installed the 30 day trial version of the software on my desktop PC and am off to create my first notebook pages. The goal is to familiarize myself with the tools and tricks of using the SmartBoard effectively to allow students to interact and become engaged by taking advantage of the “Wow” factor. I am trying to come up with different pages, that show off how different grade levels and subject areas could use this tool to transform their teaching.

I had a few teachers stand in awe in front of the board today, shaking their head in disbelieve and utter

This is the future, isn’t it? We have to get with it!

Maybe my efforts of talking social networking, web 2.0, connecting, collaboration, communication, etc. were too abstract for some teachers. Maybe they needed to see some physical in order to understand that their teaching needs to transform and evolve in order to reach the kids of the 21st century and prepare them for this flat world. Maybe…

I am very encouraged to hear all the positive comments today from teachers, the “Wows”, “Aahhs”, “Do it again” and “How did you do that?” from our students. What a thrilling way to teach!!!

I had a good day today…

Stay tuned for documentation on what and how I am discovering this SmartBoard in the next few days.