Reflecting on the SMART Board

Wow! I loved to see all of the variety in presentations on Tuesday night! How awesome to see all of the various ways that SMART Board can be used . . . from "clickies" to Jeapoardy to learning what vowels looks like! It's so exciting to me just to see how useful and helpful it really is as an educator. I love it to for being so applicable to my generation . . . really, it is very entertaining to be able to play interactive games in order to learn lessons, and it makes learning seem so much more fun and . . . adventurous!!

The next day in Instructional Design, Prof. Garrett (who was there with her MIT program students on Tuesday night) was commenting on the SMART Board. She was noting how in her early years as a teacher, the administration at her school chose to only provide one single computer for the school. They explained to the teachers that computers were simply a passing phase, and in a few years no one would even use them anymore in education anyway . . . so it was useless to invest a lot of money in them. I laugh to think that that was their perspective at the time . . . how preposterous!! Technology, and specifically computers, have changed education entirely and given my generation, and increasingly for those that follow, opportunities never dreamed of before the era of computers. I projected my thoughts forward into coming years . . . how easy it is for me to be trapped into the same way of thinking: that SMART Boards may be just a passing phase. But then I laugh to think that there's a good chance that in only a few years, every teacher and every classroom will have one and will wonder what teaching was like before they existed.

It's so great that I get to spend time now learning how to be comfortable with it and use it, because each week I grow increasingly aware of its many uses in the classroom . . . and continue to dream up new ways that I can use it to enhance the learning experience of my students, whether in Sciences or in Language Arts. The SMART board is so . . . SMART!!

I felt like the presentations on Tuesday night were really fun, and I learned a lot. I especially enjoyed presenting . . . how amazing that I feel so comfortable using technology that scared me so much only a few weeks ago!!