3/11 post

I think one of the great things about whiteboard technology is that it provides a different style of teaching other than lecturing and other in-class activities. There are many games, activities, and interactive forms of learning on the Smartboard software, and many of them involve students as well.

The technology wasn't difficult to use, since many of the tools were readily available and only needed to be modified to be used correctly. More difficult was the narrowing down of the ideas and deciding what exactly to do with each interactive tool.

Some of the pros of the smartboards were what I've listed above: they're interactive, they have many unique tools and features, and they add variety to a curriculum. Some cons are: definitely the cost, especially considering the $1 billion cut to educational funding in PA. Also, some teachers may use smartboards excessively as an alternative to good teaching, just as some teachers do with videos.

I wish I had been familiar with Smartboard software when I had taken my Secondary Methods class, as it would have worked perfectly with one of my lessons. For this lesson, I had the students create a monster presented in Dante's Inferno, with 3 students each designing the head, upper body, and lower body respectively. The catch was, no group could see what the other groups had done, so by the end the beast came out looking grotesque. Smartboard software would have worked great, as the students could have drawn their parts on the smartboard while the other students turned to face the back of the room, and then I could have hidden the section of the monster so the next group could draw.
Another of my lessons involved labeling the circles of hell in the Inferno, which would have been much more interactive on a whiteboard versus a powerpoint.

3/2 post

I think learning all the skills necessary to complete our projects for the Software Productivity Lab will be very useful when I am a teacher. In particular using Inspiration will be very helpful. It makes it very easy to create concept maps which can then be interactive, involving the students in the lesson. Also, learning how to use Word effectively will save lots of time. I remember making my first test in Word and having it take a half hour to make one page because I individually spaced each question and the blank for that question. Now that I know how to use tables to make my answer spaces, it saves so much time. My test for our project only took 5 minutes to make, which saved a lot of time that was spent on better things.