"T'WAS BRILLIG AND THE SLITHY TOVES..."
By Karen Bass, Robin Copland, Camille Ehrenberg and
Tracy Fedonchik: First Program Teachers
At Thanksgiving, last November, when first graders in House 46 wrote list poems about things for which they were thankful, "having a Smart Board" was included in many of their poems, along with family, friends, food and The Dalton School. Clearly, the Smart Board is well loved. It has also generated excitement and enthusiasm for learning.
What is a Smart Board? It is an interactive electronic whiteboard that is connected to and an extension of the computer. Computer images are displayed on the board with a projector where they can be seen and manipulated. Teachers and students can add notations by using a stylus or a finger. Any information on the screen can be manipulated from the laptop or by touching the screen, the finger operating as the mouse. Any of this can be saved and printed. The Smart Board facilitates teaching to diverse learning modalities: visual (text, pictures, animation, video), auditory (sounds, music, word pronunciation, oral reports) and tactile (pens and fingers allow physical interaction with the board). This makes it a versatile teaching tool that accommodates an array of student learning styles.
The Smart Board has transformed teaching at the First Program. It enables students' thinking to be captured, transcending the time and space parameters of the traditional blackboard. For instance, with a Smart Board, not only can children share their solutions to a problem in a large group setting by explaining their thinking on the board, but their work can also be archived for future reference. A particular solution created and explained on one day can be compared to another method used to solve the same problem on another day. A Smart Board provides a limitless canvas for students as well. By necessity, the blackboard space used to set forth ideas in the beginning of a discussion must be ceded to other ideas as space is used up. With a Smart Board, the information is not erased; a new page is created.
The Smart Board has also transformed teaching by creating an interactive environment that generates excitement and interest. Visual manipulatives, such as clocks, rulers, dice, a 100 chart, money, pattern blocks, attribute blocks, base 10 blocks and geometric shapes, and graphic organizers like Venn diagrams, webs and charts, can be accessed. The ability to touch and move digital objects like pictures and manipulatives, as well as text, resonates with children born into the Age of Technology. Even the most mundane activity - such as practicing addition math facts - is thrilling to first graders when they are using two random number generators on the Smart Board to find the sum of the numbers that appear. In fact, it is so much fun that many children choose to play random number generator addition during their free choice time.
Teachers and students have seemingly limitless access to information and resources when using the Smart Board. During a Language Arts lesson, second graders in House 34 were exploring syntax. The teacher projected previously prepared sentences on the Smart Board, while students identified nouns, verbs and adjectives, taking note of their position in the sentences. The teacher explained, "You can determine a word's part of speech by its position in the sentence. This is true even if you don't know the word - in fact, even if the word is perfect nonsense." In a moment of inspiration, the teacher turned to the computer that was driving the Smart Board, googled "Jabberwocky," and brought up the poem on the screen. The excitement in the room was palpable as the children eagerly looked for and underlined nouns, verbs and adjectives on the board. At the end of the lesson, the teacher created a link on his syntax lesson page to the "Jabberwocky" website for future use, and the children learned yet another lesson - how to create links.
Through the use of the Smart Board, students can envision the world and visit faraway places from their 91st Street classrooms. "Wow! Where is Dalton?" asked a House 43 student as the class looked at a digital map of the Earth as presented by Google Earth. With a touch of the virtual keyboard on the Smart Board, the class blasted toward Earth, destination 53 East 91st Street. "I can see the roof!" exclaimed one student. After a survey of our school neighborhood and the greater New York City area, the class took off to a not-so-familiar, distant location. Within minutes, the children were on Willow Street in New Orleans, looking at a satellite picture of the Lusher School. For the next forty-five minutes, the children's inquiries guided the geographical investigation of New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast of the United States. This sort of multi-media presentation of curricular material creates opportunities for immediate, direct responses to children's questions and comments. As in the Google Earth example, both the teacher and the students were actualizing self-motivated learning, taking control of authentic inquiry, applying critical thinking, and owning their understandings in very individual and personal ways.
The benefits of the Smart Board to students and teachers are bountiful; this tool has been a blessing. The teachers at Little Dalton agree with the first graders - the Smart Board is definitely on our list of things for which we are thankful.