SMART Board Unveiled

In September, we welcomed our long awaited, much anticipated SMART Board! Leading up to its appearance, the students regularly posted sticky notes on our parking lot that said "when is the SMART Board coming?" and "how do we use a SMART Board?" and "what is a SMART Board?" Our parking lot is a place where students can post questions that are floating in their brain and that can't be answered right at that moment. At some point later on that day or week, I always get around to discussing parking lot questions. Anyway, one afternoon, two burly men appeared in our classroom after school hours and installed our SMART Board. I was so excited they were there; I even took pictures of the installation process to show the students. Yay!!!

So, what is a SMART Board anyway? It is an interactive white board with a touch screen. It has a sturdy steel back and is connected to one of our classroom computers. I have all of the SMART Board software downloaded to my school and personal computers to work with from home and plan lessons. It is a highly engaging learning tool that we can write on (in all different ways...with our fingers, with the special pens, using calligraphic ink, using magic disappearing ink...the list goes on and on). Many interactive lesson plans are already uploaded to an incredible, safe site called SMART Exchange and are aligned with Common Core State Standards. I can create our own SMART Board lessons, which I do from time to time, but the resources we have available to us that are already made and ready to rock are amazing. Two students can interact with the board at a time. I usually pull popsicle sticks for students to come to the board. So far, we have used it for all subject areas and will continue to do so throughout the year.

This technology was new to our second grade youngsters, but I wasn't at all surprised that within 10 minutes of using it, our students were itching to explore with it...no cold feet in our room! Our students and their generation have been coined "digital natives" and rightfully so; our second graders are savvy with this unique tool and though we have just dipped our toes in the huge ocean of SMART technology, our students are acclimated and comfortable with it. 

What have we done on the SMART Board so far? 

-Interactively graphed how many teeth we have lost in 2B and interpreted our data

-Shared-writing journaling about fall: different students come up and add a sentence to a whole-class journal entry using our 5 senses (to be continued this week)

-Watched kid-friendly videos to help the even/odd digits stick in our brains

-Learned about Viking clothing, occupations, homes, and locations

-Written story problems using a gumball machine with digital manipulative gumballs

-Worked with money by filling up digital coin purses and writing corresponding number sentences

-Watched Ms. Baier model the art of journaling about fall topics

...and much more to come this week (and the next, and the next!)

Here is a photo sampling. I took some screen shots of our SMART Notebook files to give you a taste of what our work together has looked like. It doesn't exactly do it justice, as the uber cool interactive piece is missing, but at least you get an idea of what this is all about!

I began our lesson about creating and interpreting bar graphs by setting the purpose with this silly slide!

We dragged our pictures to the appropriate bars on the graph to create and interpret a class graph about teeth lost in 2B!

I wrote this entry in front of the students to model the process of journaling and living a writerly life.

Stay tuned for more SMART updates!