When I first saw the board I was excited and full of ideas of all the wonderful lessons I could do using the Smart Board, but I wasn't sure how to go about doing everything I wanted to. I spent some time watching tutorials and playing with Smart Notebook and eventually was able to develop a basic understanding of the Smart Technologies. I know use my Smart Board every day for morning meeting. When my students come into the classroom they put their backpacks and coats away and come up to the board one at a time to find their name and put it into a bucket on the Smart Board. This turned out to be a great activity for my preschoolers because it addresses multiple learning objectives such as turn taking (one person touches the board at a time), exposure to technology, hand eye coordination (dragging and dropping name in bucket), and name recognition.
Once everyone has signed in we count how many students are missing by identifying the names that are not in the bucket. We then write the number on the board using the markers. Next I empty the bucket and we count the students who are present and practice writing this number on the board. In this activity students are exposed to counting, 1:1 correspondence, name recognition, letter recognition, number recognition, and number writing.
Later on in our morning meeting we do the weather and our weather person gets to identify and move the correct weather pictures as well as temperature pictures onto a sentence strip on the Smart Board to make a sentence about todays weather. This helps students with basic sentence structure, identifying scientific weather concepts, and confidence standing and speaking in front of a group of peers.
After weather we dress up a naked kangaroo named Joey in clothes appropriate for today's weather. This is one of my students favorite activities and can lead to some interesting conversations! This helps with hand eye coordination, logic skills, basic identification of clothing types and colors.
I also try to fit in a variety of other activities on my Smart Board depending on our learning objectives for that day or our unit of study. During Halloween we practiced drawing lines to connect a baby ghost, bat, spider, and mummy to their mommies or daddies. This helped my students to practice their prewriting skills, hand eye coordination, and logic skills. Another activity we did was making a jack-o-lantern by dragging and dropping different shapes onto a pumpkin image. This lead to discussions of different types of shapes and helped my students with shape recognition and identification. We also do sorting games, pattern games, sing songs, and watch videos all using Smart Technologies.
Overall I find that having a Smart Board in my classroom is a benefit and results in positive learning experiences for my students. Occasionally we have technical issues that result in me needing to rework my lessons for the day but flexibility is a virtue and is required of any classroom teacher! I try to use these moments as teachable ones with my students to help them to learn flexibility, resiliency, and the ability to properly cope without stress under such situations.