SMART Boards at Mill Pond School

REVIEW — Jeremiah Goff, second grade student at Mill Pond School reviews math vocabulary words via an interactive game on the SMART Board.
By Sara Deveau
    Depending on your age, memories of school may evoke images of a chalkboard. It was a coveted job to be chosen to take the erasers outside and clap them together to clean them for the teacher. The person would return with nearly all of the dust transferred from the eraser to his or her clothes.
    Others may think more of large chart tablets or a white board that the teacher used during lessons.         Students of more recent years may also remember the overhead projector that used transparencies to project onto the wall. The user was left with ink smeared across the transparency, the user’s fingers, and the occasional piece of clothing.
    All are becoming obsolete as students of today are experiencing lessons through the use of a SMART Board.
    A SMART Board is an interactive whiteboard that displays the attached computer’s desktop image on the interactive whiteboard screen. The whiteboard then acts as a large touch screen allowing the user to scroll, type, move content on the screen, and interact in a multitude of ways with the tip of a finger.
    Each touch from a finger, marker, or solid object is interpreted by the SMART board as a left-click from the mouse. Users can also use the digital ink markers to write or draw and then use the eraser to erase (no ink or chalk dust!).
    Over the past few years at Mill Pond School, SMART Boards have been replacing chalkboards, white boards, and overheads classroom by classroom some through grants and others through the work of the principal and the district technology committee.         Also a new addition is the SMART Response system which are hand held student devices that allow each student to respond to material or quizzes using a keypad similar to a remote control.         Instead of asking a question and calling on one student, all students have the opportunity to answer and stay engaged. Teachers can instantly view results, and this instant feedback allows them the opportunity to see where to target instruction.
    Having a SMART Board in the classroom has been a teacher’s version of winning the lottery. After some training, teachers quickly recognize its potential for use in the classroom, and anyone who has one wonders how they could ever teach without it. Students are equally as enthusiastic and love the interactive features of using it. Most classrooms from Pre-kindergarten to grade 8 have one, and the goal is to have one in every classroom.