Smartboard

Last week I had the opportunity to view a Smartboard presentation from the TIE's office in the education building. This was one of the topics they had a workshop on the other week during the technology conference. We were given a demo of how a smartboard works and some ideas of how you could use it in the classroom. After that we were given the opportunity to play around on them and discover things on our own, and go through a "scavenger hunt." I was impressed with this technology, they have been in a lot of my MSU classrooms, but the teachers never used them for anything but showing videos. Basically a smartboard is a touch sensitive board that has a projected image of your computer screen on it. It is like having a giant touchscreen monitor, so you can control the "mouse" with you finger, write, highlight, or pretty much anything that you can do on your computer.
Some nice features about the Smartboard include that it will convert PowerPoint's into its presenter tool, and then you can write on them or whatever without any headaches. When you open up a web browser you can highlight things, or circle them and then take a snapshot and it will automatically go right into the document that you have open. You can handwrite on the board, then click on it and change it into typed text, change the font, angle...
The one thing I really liked about it is that everything just becomes so much more fun when you utilize this type of technology. Writing on the board was always awesome in school, but with a Smartboard it is even cooler. Plus there are a lot of interactive tools with it. For example there is a frog dissection activity where you actually cut the frog open, pin it back and find all of the organs. There are "game shows" that you can make to review for tests, and it just makes everything more fun and interactive.
Using a Smartboard would take some getting used to, and it is not perfect. There are some issues with it getting out of "focus" but this is a quick fix just by orienting it. This technology is going to be around for a long time and I am certain that developers will continue to push the envelope and create new and interesting ways to incorporate this tool for learning in the classroom.