Second Thoughts from a Luddite

I know most of the department is way ahead of me in the use of technology...but just in case, I'll share what I noticed on Thursday at Overlake School.

Every classroom in the Humanities building has a Smartboard, so I got to see lots of different uses of this technology. Everyone seems to take attendance with it: the MyBackpack class roster is displayed on the Smartboard at the beginning of every class. Student names are set to a default PRESENT, so teachers just tap the names of the one or two students who are missing and hit submit.

From there, approaches varied.

In some classes, the board just went dark and the teacher carried on as if this expensive equipment had never been installed. However, if a question arose in class, the Smartboard was there and answers to factual questions were immediately available.

Some teachers used the Smartboard to access their files. Rather than distributing 18 little half-sheets of paper, one teacher displayed a new assignment on the Smartboard. The same approach was used while discussing poetry. The three lines of In a Station of the Metro were displayed on the Smartboard, instead of being handed out on paper. After the students had articulated their own response to the poem, the teacher showed them a passage from a letter which Pound had written about this poem and a picture of the Paris metro.

Students seemed to know their way around the Smartboard too. I saw a couple of them give presentations on the first world war, combining power-point slides with You Tube. A cool feature is that if the Smartboard is displaying a map of troop movements on the Passchendaele front, you can draw all over the slide with luridly colored Smartboard pens. When you advance to the next slide, the board is miraculously clean.

The last nifty Smartboard Thing I saw was a presentation in a Comparative Religions class. The teacher in this class had prepared a few pages of a Notebook file for the Smartboard. On the first page, he had typed two words: GOD and HISTORY, which he used to elicit student reactions. He jotted down student suggestions under these headings, just like you'd do with a whiteboard. However, the Smartboard enabled him to slide a nifty virtual screen/shade over the surface of the board to conceal/reveal these lists. After he'd taken down student reactions to these two words, the instructor was able to transition to a page with some definitions he'd typed up in advance. The touch of a button had the effect of neatly organizing all the messy ideas the teacher had just elicited from his students.

Some of this isn't too different from what you can do with an old-fashioned overhead...but I'm thinking that next time I find myself in a room with a Smartboard, I'm going to turn it on.