icsd+successes

ICSD Celebrates Success with SMART Technologies!

Elementary Teacher Librarian
Since I have had the SMART Board my lessons have become much more interactive. I use it for teaching web evaluation (5th grade), worksheets which we do together instead w/paper copies, web site games which reinforce my literacy lessons, math practice, etc. The list goes on and on.

 Attached are some worksheets I used for assessment of some library lessons (3rd grade, 2nd grade). I am also sharing the Google map that ties in with several lessons I do on the Underground Railroad (4th grade).

 I also used the database Rand McNally to have Kindergartners design a map of a zoo 5th graders learn the states in a timed US map game.

 My list could go on and on. Suffice it to say, I have used the SMART Board daily in my lessons and the students have been REALLY engaged.  __Sweet Tooth__ Word Search (2nd)  __[|http://www.margiepalatini.com/activities/mazes-searches#sweet_tooth_word_search]__  __Gorgonzola__ Match Game (1st)  __[]__

Middle School social studies
My goal this year was to integrate use of the Smart Board into my teaching to help reach a wider range of student learning styles, to enrich my teaching, and to support the teaching of technology. This was the first year that I had a Smart Board in my room and therefore was free to use it at any time. To meet my goal, I did research online regarding best-practices for using a Smart Board in a middle school classroom. With these ideas and techniques as a foundation, I planned weekly Smart Board integration lessons. Some examples of this was using the SB to play National Geography map games during the Map Skills units. Students would come up to the board to play interactive games that required practice with grids, longitude and latitude, scale and distance, identifying continents etc. In my Egypt unit we used the SB to take a virtual tour of the pyramid complex at Giza and to explore the tombs of KV5 in the Valley of the Kings. I used the SB to display large type primary source documents to help students analyze the texts, using the SB markers to make notes, and underline and highlight areas of importance or areas for discussion. We used the Smart Board to do an interactive activity on works cited. I created an activity wherein all the separate parts of several works cited entries were made into puzzle pieces. Students needed to come up to the board and move the pieces around until they had a correctly formed works cited entry. I found students were much more willing to write and edit if we displayed their work on the Smart Board and took turns coming up to edit the work with the SB markers.

I made an interesting discovery whilst using the Smart Board this year. I found I used it even more often on a spontaneous basis than on a planned basis. Several times a week I found students asking questions, or the class discussion leading us to a point where a visual would be really useful. Because I am now more comfortable with the Smart Board, and it is a permanent part of my classroom, I could immediately pull up a short video from Youtube, or a picture or text that could illustrate and greatly enrich the discussion on a spontaneous basis. An example was a lesson I gave on the Parthenon of Greece. Students were asking why it was considered such an architectural marvel. We read about it, and saw pictures from the text book, but I remembered a short Youtube video segment that demonstrated the math and optical illusions built into the Parthenon. I pulled that up and the students were fascinated by the explanation. Another example was a discussion on the plague. Students wanted to know if the plague still existed in the world. I quickly went to google and pulled up a map that showed were incidents of the plague are still recorded. At least once a week, if not more, I use the Smart Board on the spur of the moment to the great enrichment of the “teaching moment.”

Middle school science
Some of the things I use it for. 1) daily board where I post agenda, essential question, what to get out, what to pick up, homework and announcements. Then I save the daily board as a pdf and post it on my blackboard site everyday. I attach the handouts for the day to the daily board on blackboard. 2) run my on line earth science animations off of it, Youtube, Powerpoint etc. use the smartboard functions to highlight and emphasis different aspects of the previous. 3) use it for all brainstorms and notes with students, post on blackboard 4) create, animate weather maps mimicking meterorologists on tv. Kids add and interact during this activity as well 5) use it for the final analysis of the wind energy project in arcgis. Pull up a completed map, then have each group in the class add where their chosen site is, just making polygons and then analyze the results as a class using the arcgis functions. 6) student mini presentations

Next year, want to use clickers, perhaps get own set!

High school math
The SMART board made it possible to project the game on the big screen with lots of colors and graphics. I was to include all the geometric figures I needed. The jeopardy music from TV played while each team solved the problems. The interactive nature of the game, going from one slide to the other and having student see the correct answer after working on the problem made it very instructive and lots of fun. I also was able to write on the slide in case any team had questions about how to do the problems. After a while, no one really cared that much about which team was winning -- they were just having a ton of fun playing the game and learning. I'm attaching one game I made. I did import the template from the SMART teacher site and changed it all to meet my curriculum. I'm attaching the Geometry one, but the Algebra I is more colorful. Also, this game was used by another teacher to review for the Regents. [|SMART_Jeopardy Geometry REVIEW]