More Smart Board Ideas

Smart Boards have lots of potential uses in the classroom. This post will share more ideas for using your Smart Board on the web. The first post in this series provides more general tips and tricks for using Smart Boards, while the second explores my favorite ways to use Smart Notebook in my classroom.

More Smart Board Ideas

Media Center

Having a Smart Board eliminates the need for a separate TV or DVD player in your classroom, as long as the computer you use has a DVD player. I recommend getting a separate set of speakers to help with the sound. A Smart Board can easily share DVDs as well as You Tube or other online videos, provided you have a fast enough Internet connect to stream videos.

Skype

Last year was the first time using our Smart Board for Skype, and it was a great success! We had a Skype author visit from the ever-engaging Tara Lazar, who read aloud her book The Monstore, while I flipped pages in our class copy. We also did a Mystery Skype with another class, where we switched off asking yes/no questions to try and determine their location. (Pro tip, remind your students not to wear identifiable t-shirts that day, local sports teams, etc. Kids are ruthless observers!)

Skype-ing with a Smart Board works best if you can easily position your computer and webcam near the Smart Board itself. For our Tara Lazar talk, the laptop was a little off to the side (on a folding kitchen step stool), which meant she usually saw the side of kids' heads. When we did our Mystery Skype, it was in our computer lab, which is a longer room, so we put the computer on a cart in front of the board.

Giant Read Alouds

You can use the Kindle app on any computer, tablet, or phone to share books with students on the Smart Board. This is great for stories with really detailed illustrations or other text features that you want everyone to easily to able to see. Back in the day, I scanned the entirety of Love that Dog for reading aloud, because I wanted my students to see and appreciate the line breaks. (Read more about Teaching Poetry with Love that Dog.)

PowerPoint, Google Slides, Haiku Deck, Prezi, etc.

The Smart Board is an excellent way to present information. Since you are not limited to only using Smart Notebook, you can use any type of presentation software or web site to share information. When I bring in parents to share about other countries, PowerPoint is often their software of choice for sharing photographs and facts.

Padlet for Real-Time Collaboration

This is one I have not tackled yet, but I know of many teachers who use Padlet for collaboration within the classroom. For schools where students have access to their own tablets or laptops, you could conceivably have the whole class logged into a single Padlet page, sharing thoughts and ideas in real time. (I will admit that when I picture this with third graders, I picture mass chaos!)

Student Screen Sharing

There are also devices available that let students share their own tablet or laptop screens directly with the Smart Board. The Chromecast from Google plugs into the projector itself and allows anyone with a Chromebook or Chromecast app to send their screen to the projector. I observed a middle school teacher who had his students use the Chromecast to each share a presentation with the class.

Document Camera

Document cameras are another great piece of technology to integrate with a Smart Board. A document camera allows you to easy share print media up on the board. You place the book, for example, underneath the camera, which then sends a live image of it onto the screen. This would also work well with items like math manipulatives.

Gaming

The Smart Board can also be used like a giant projection screen TV. Once a year as part of our school fundraiser, my classroom becomes the game room, and either a Wii or XBox gets plugged into the projector for giant-sized gaming fun. For last year's "Teach a Teacher Tuesday," several of my third graders used the web-based version of Minecraft to teach me all about the game on the big screen.

The Web

Finally, of course, you can do anything on your Smart Board that you can do on your regular computer. You can also use the pens and "ink" to mark up a digital page for reference. I appreciate the ability to model reading or using a web site in front of students.

How Do You Use Your Smart Board?

What other great ideas do you have for using a Smart Board in the classroom? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

My Favorite Uses of Smart Notebook

Smart Notebook is the software program that comes along with the SmartBoard-brand boards used at my school. This post highlights several of my favorite ways to use Smart Notebook in my classroom. The first post in this series provides more general tips and tricks for using Smart Boards.

My Favorite Uses of Smart Notebook

Your Job Today

The Smart Board serves as the hub for my classroom. When students come in in the morning, it often has our first activity up or prompts students to get their reading folders and prepare to share a read aloud. At the end of our time together on the rug, I often use the Smart Board to display "Your Job Today," a concise listing of expectations for independent work.

Sharing Digital Texts

I use Smart Notebook for nearly every writing lesson that I do with students. (We use Lucy Calkin's amazing Units of Study for Teaching Writing as our basis.) Smart Notebook provides an easy way to create charts, read and study texts together, and get students launched into independent writing time.

Annotating or Editing Digital Texts

Throughout our poetry unit, in particular, I love to have students reading and discussing poems. Smart Notebook provides a way to easily add annotation, notes, underlines, highlights, and more to poems as we work on them together as a class. This is also a great way to model editing skills or to have students complete editing activities as a class or small group.

Writing Shared Texts

Modeling writing in front of students is powerful. Writing on the Smart Board in front of students allows them to see the creative process at work. You can also create shared writing pieces with different members of the class contributing to a scene or story. It is much easier to share and refer back to these pieces of writing digitally than with handwritten chart paper.

Matching our details to our feelings

Revising Shared Texts

Revision is another critically-important literacy tool and one that can be enhanced by Smart Notebook. I have set up texts that can be separated and pulled apart to encourage students to add on or flesh out a story or other piece of writing. Ideas and topics can be visually rearranged to work on organization or outlining. (Below, these ideas could be rearranged to make a compelling paragraph.)

Modeling Skills

The Smart Board is also really useful for modeling a skill for students. In our geography lessons, I will often post a copy of an assignment or section of it so that we can do a few examples together. With something like latitude and longitude, it is great to have the flexibility to do as many together as well need.

Random Name Generator

I use this only occasionally, but the kids get a big kick out of it. Smart Notebook has a random name generator that you can use to call on students. You can either leave it completely random or have it only choose students once ("no repeat").

You can also use this to select randomly from a set of questions for students to answer. I use this as a getting to you know activity at the beginning of the year. Kids can choose a question from the list, or they can use the random generator to pick a question for them to answer. (Students used the large white square to practice writing their name on the board.)

Hide and Reveal Activities

You can also use the click-to-dissolve option within Smart Notebook to create hide and reveal activities. Our fourth graders always wrap up the year with the big 50 states and capitals test. Using a map of the US, I drew a series of boxes to cover up the names of each state and its capital. To review, students were encouraged to guess the name of the state/capital out loud before clicking to check their guess.

Small Group Review Activities

The Smart Board can also be used by smaller groups. When we are studying continents at the beginning of the year, kids go up in table groups to play a series of review games on the Smart Board. These particular games are very simple (matching, mapping, multiple choice), so the kids can usually run them by themselves. Just make sure that you have something engaging for the rest of the class to be working on while they are waiting their turns!

What are your favorite types of activities to do with students using Smart Notebook? (Next up is a post about Smart Board possibilities outside of just the Smart Notebook software.)

Smart Board Tips and Tricks

I have had a Smart Board in my classroom for several years, and this year I was again asked to create and present a Smart Board workshop for my colleagues. Since I was already working to put together all this information, I thought I might as well share it more widely! This first post will focus on tips and tricks for using a Smart Board and Smart Notebook software in the classroom.

Tips and Tricks for Smart Board Setup

The order of operations matters. Any time that you want to use a Smart Board, be sure to complete the following steps in sequence.

1. Make sure that the computer is plugged into the Smart Board (USB) and to the projector (Mac computers need an additional dongle).
2. Turn on the projector.
3. Turn on the computer.

If the computer is connected to the projector when it turns on, it will automatically adjust its screen size and resolution to match that of the Smart Board. If the computer is already on before the projector is connected, the computer will retain its screen's aspect ratio, which may result in a disproportionate or squished look when projected onto the Smart Board.

Troubleshooting: you may need to choose the "Mirror Displays" options in display settings, which will tell the computer to display the same screen on the projector as on the computer itself.

Background tip: When starting up, the projector will display your computer's desktop. Keep that in mind when choosing a background wallpaper, and I recommend trying to avoid keeping files saved on the desktop. (This is an easy one to forget if you are using a personal computer. Unless you want your students to be immediately distracted by a giant picture of your dog, don't use personal photos for your computer's wallpaper.)

Get in the habit of orienting your Smart Board as soon as you turn it on and are logged into your computer. (For SmartBoard-brand boards, you can hold down the two buttons together to activate the Orient action.) Although kids love to hit the orient crosshairs, I have found it much more efficient to orient the board myself, as precision is critical.

Tips and Tricks for Writing on a Smart Board

When writing on a Smart Board, always remember that the board responds to the last object picked up. If you pick up one of the colored markers to write and then pick up the eraser, anything that touches the Smart Board (marker, eraser, finger, pointer, etc.) will act as an eraser. If you put the eraser back, then the Smart Board will "remember" that the previous object was a pen, and anything touching the board will write like the pen.

When writing with a pen on the Smart Board, be aware of where your hand is in relation to the board. Many times when my students come up to write on the Smart Board for the first time, they grip the pen in such a way that they end up resting the side of their hand against the board. They are startled to discover that they are now writing with the edge of their hand and not where the pen point is. (Having kids write with their finger or a pointer while holding the pen in their other hand is an easy solution.)

The pen itself does not really determine its own color or style. By default, picking the red pen out of the red tray will make it write in red, but you can use the pull tab or toolbars to change the color, size, and style of the pen. I most often use this option to turn on highlighting when reading or responding to texts on the board.

You have two options to erase "ink" from the Smart Board. You can pick up and use the eraser, which erases in a large circle shape, or you can use the eraser to trace a larger circle around anything you wish to erase. Draw the circle, tap once inside it, and all the ink will disappear. (Using the Smart Board eraser does not erase typed text or images.)

Write Large, Write Legibly. You will need to use larger fonts when typing on a Smart Board screen. I usually use Arial as the font with a minimum font size of 24. You want to make sure that all students can easily see and read the information on the board.

Tips and Tricks for Managing Files on a Smart Board

If you are using a Smart Board connected to a school computer in your classroom, then you will want to come up with a system for transferring files back-and-forth between a school and personal computer. I have found that Dropbox is an easy way to keep Smart Board files synced. I can edit files on my personal computer or school computer and syncing keeps them both up-to-date. (You can use the 'selective sync' option within Dropbox to only share a folder of Smart Board files with your school computer, rather than sharing everything.) New to Dropbox? Using this referral link helps me store more files in the cloud at no cost to you!

Separate Originals and Class Copies: If you are using a Smart Notebook file with students, you may find it useful to save the file at the end of a class lesson to include all the notes or annotations you added as a class. I strongly recommend using "Save As" at the end of the lesson to save a new copy of your file. I use Save As and then append the date to a given lesson. (So, The-Tide-Rises becomes The-Tide-Rises-150524 if I shared it on May 24th, 2015.) Then, next year, I already have a clean copy of the file to use, or I can pull up the "after" version to see what kids came up with.

Export Smart Notebook Files: You can use File --> Export within the SmartNotebook software to save a lesson created in Notebook as a web page, image files, PDF, or even PowerPoint. Exporting to PDF is a great way to then share your lesson with students so that they can access and refer back to the files.

Smart Board Tips and Tricks

Do you have any favorite Smart Board hacks or tricks? Share your thoughts in the comments below!