Saturday, August 28, 2010

Smartboard Saves My Life!!

Pardon the dramatic title but I honestly am blown away by all the possibilities of using a Smartboard in the classroom and the HUGE increase in student engagment and the HUGE decrease in the amount of planning time I am doing on the weekends. (wait a minute, its saturday and i am writing this....hmmmm, oh well :) ).
So I am using the Smartboard from the minute my students come in and take their own attendance on it, through every subject, and through every busy minute where I reward positive class behavior with marbles they can move into our marble "jar"!
I have downloaded a ton of lessons and have actually really enjoyed making some of my own. I created a Science Notebook lesson that I felt went well. We had not started our FOSS kits yet so we did an experiment with GAK to start learning about how scientists ask questions, make predictions, and observations. The students made a prediction about what we would use to make GAK and dragged the item into a table on the Smartboard. Then I linked a youtube of other kids making GAK for the procedure. Last I took video of them making GAK and sharing observations and inserted one onto the Notebook file. It was pretty successful though I still have a LOT to learn about dealing with video files!!! I wanted to attach this lesson to my wetpaint site but the file was too big. Any advice?
Just to show a bit of what is on the Notebook lesson, here is a video of two kiddos describing their gak.....super amateur video on my part but its a start!
Thanks!
Jenny

2 comments:

Kelly Berry said...

Jenny,

Thanks for sharing all you do day-to-day with the SmartBoard! Can you believe how far you have come in your technology integration since May! WOW! Your entire lesson for science (GAK) sounded exciting, engaging, purposeful and FUN.

Jon Fisher said...

Wow, Jenny! It sounds like you are jumping in headfirst with the Smartboard. I am interested in the marble "jar". Can you share it with me or tell me where you got it?
Your video is great! I bet the kids had a blast. Great job so far!