A New Toy!

The technology department FINALLY got the computer hooked up to my Smartboard this week, and loaded the software yesterday...SWEET!

My counterpart. at the other elementary school in my district. had an interactive whiteboard for MOST of last year. When I heard that I was getting one, I wasn't TERRIBLY thrilled...it looked like a high priced TOY to me. I went over to her school and watched her do a couple of things, and STILL thought "there are WAY better ways to spend the money that these things cost"!

Okay...I was WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Apparently, how USEFUL they are depends on how skilled you are at utilizing the technology!!! It's a GREAT device for making games more interactive, but it has a TON of practical uses as well. Case in point: I had a group of 4th graders come in today to "play" Atlas MAPGO (a BINGO game I created, using answers to questions I made up from various maps in the atlases in my reference collection).

About 20 minutes before they came, I thought..."there's some sort of 'shade' you can use to cover up the things you don't want students to see...maybe I could figure that out before they get here" (and could, as a result, LOSE the lame overhead projector and piece of paper I'd been using).

The Smartboard program is VERY intuitive, and, within 10 minutes, I had the "shade" feature figured out, and applied to my presentation! The students were "oohing" and "ahhhing" as I slid the "shade" up and down, merely by rubbing my finger along the whiteboard, and, when I picked up the red marker "pen" and used my FINGER to underline the key words in the sentence, they practically JUMPED out of their seats to give it a try (I think I've just created an ENTIRE class of new teachers...I told them they could only use it if they were educators...HA!).

Even COOLER was when they couldn't find Maryland in their atlas...all I had to do was tap the board to get to the internet, search GOOGLE for a map, tap the map, and it appeared on the whiteboard (icing on the cake was picking up the BLUE marker and, again, using my finger, circling the state in question).

I can't WAIT to go back tomorrow to adapt some of my OTHER lessons to this new (and TOTALLY COOL) technology!!!!

Hope YOU found something in your work day that pleasantly surprised you!