Walk into any classroom in Australia and you’ll find many things in common. Desks, chairs and whiteboards can be found in every classroom, along with the usual pens and paper. In the centre of every room, you can usually find a SMARTboard, an interactive whiteboard which connects to a computer and allows students to interact with the content via a touch screen interface. But sadly, in many classroom this valuable resource is underused. SMARTboards are an incredibly useful tool that can change the way that information is presented to our students.
But how precisely can they be used?
This website recommends using SMARTboards to take notes, brainstorm, play educational games and display data of many kinds – visuals, audio, videos and text to name a few. Another website uses the boards to save student work without taking up space, create bright and visual displays, research on the internet in a way that the whole class can participate, and to ‘flip’ the classroom, an innovative teaching technique which involves the teacher creating a digital ‘lesson’ where learners review the lesson at home, before coming to school and working on problems and practical tasks relating to the lesson.
I personally have used SMARTboards to compile student ideas, create interactive powerpoints, display videos, and create stories that have input from the whole class.
There are many other ways to use these boards in the classroom, and with a little creativity and ingenuity can become a essential part of any classroom.
Professional Learning Board. (n.d.) Using smart boards in the classroom. Retrieved 20 March 2015 from https://k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com/tlb/using-smart-boards-in-the-classroom/
Concordia Online Education. (2013). Teacher’s Guide: How to use the smart board in the clashttp://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/educator-tips/teacher-s-guide-how-to-use-a-smartboard-in-the-classroom/sroom. Retrieved 20 March 2015 from
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