Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grade Smart Board?

Image credit: "Writing on a Smart Board." 02/22/2001; Jay Yoh

To paraphrase a good friend of mine, "I loves me my Smart Board." I do. I think it has a lot of potential, and I have been trying to tap some of those special features that make it so great. I have a ways to go, though, but I'm getting into the one that the school district so generously put in my classroom.

There are some in our school who don't use theirs at all, and it's not the folks that are just a few months or years away from retirement. Teachers who have been in the work force for ten years are shunning the dang things, and for what I feel are really unenlightened reasons:

• It's too complicated.
• I already have a data projector.
• It never does what I want it to.
• It's in my way.
• I like my regular ol' white board just fine.

(One of these days, Alice - bang-ZOOM, to the moon!)

This worries me for many reasons, the main one being that there has been a great deal of money spent on the things - taxpayers know that we have installed these in our classrooms. They supported the decision. It's THEIR (and I supposed a little of our own) money that is hanging on the wall not getting used. The ones who don't like or use their Smart Boards defend their position with "well, nobody ever asked me if I wanted it in my classroom."

Segue here: the room really isn't ours. We get to use it, and the stuff that's in it. We don't pay rent for it, so we can't claim proprietary rights. We really don't get to say what goes into the classroom and what doesn't when it comes to infrastructure.

The other reasons really have to do with time and energy, which I'll be the first to say is at a premium in the life of the teacher. Yes, we have to devote some time to learning a new technology while something else (planning, grading, housekeeping, bill paying, etc) gets postponed. It's frustrating, but I feel it needs to be done.

Think of it this way: the ones we teach are digital natives. They don't know a time without mobile phones, wireless computing, digital media, online access, and so on. Doesn't it stand to reason that if we weenie out on learning something that they know and can work with, it limits their learning? Would we think about showing an old film in class only on a 16 mm projector because that's they way it was meant to be shown? How about creating handouts using a hand-crank ditto-master machines? (Mmmm ... smell the pretty purple words ...) Let's bust out the overhead projector and make a slide show out of hand-drawn transparencies? Or even better, create slides of our documents  using a camera and a copy stand, send the film off to the Kodak labs for processing, get them back in two weeks, and load up the carousel projector.

Or did those take a fair amount of time and energy to learn about those technologies too?

Any new technology takes time to learn and master. Take the time to do it now - it will pay off later. It paid off today for me. The copy machine in the workroom didn't process my MS Word file for copying, so I had to put the document on the Smart Board in my room. I was able to highlight the areas I wanted to emphasize, and edit the document right in front of the students. By that time, one of the lovely student office runners arrived with freshly printed material. No time wasted, and the material presented in a way familiar to the class. Winners all around.

Are you smarter than a smart board? Yes. Yes you are.