Monday, August 30, 2010

August Blog: Teaching kids how to use the SmartBoard

It always amazes how I taught--and how kids learn--without a smartboard. I have several new students this year (new to the district) and they haven't been exposed to this technology in the past in their classrooms. The Smartboard makes kids feel so smart and successful because of the ease in which kids pick it up. They're naturals!

The SmartBoard is helping my students become independent thinkers and learners each and every day. I begin each day with a SmartBoard weather report in which the weekly weather person must look up the weather on a designated website, synthesize the information in the report, then represent the information in a non-linguistic visual display on the Smartboard. This includes plotting the temperature on a line graph, selecting the correct weather visual, adding the temperature under the correct day of the week, and orally presenting the weather to the whole class, comparing today's weather with days previous. The kids are great at helping each other to the point where I don't have to chime in at all.

If you'd like to see/use the template I've created for weather, I can email it to you. Let me know :)

Happy Global Learning this year with your students!!!

1 comment:

Kelly Berry said...

Love your daily starter Liz! Synthesizing! WOW. I'd love to see your template - maybe we can post it to the GL site or you can link it to your class blog? Thank you for sharing Liz.