White boards

[pchisholm]

My principal has said that it is possible our school would purchase as white board if there were enough interested teachers and curriculum connections. I teach 5th grade and would love to use one but would like to know how other elementary educators use this technology tool.

[dolmansaxlil]

Do you mean a Smart Board or something similar? If so, there are a million things you can do with them! We have two in our school, and three more are being installed over the next couple weeks (one in my room!)

I've borrowed one of the teacher's rooms to teach several lessons - inferencing and media. The grade 4/5 teacher uses hers for almost every lesson. The arts lessons that you can do with it are amazing, as you can show examples of paintings/sculpture/etc a lot more easily than digging out books. You can demonstrate computer programs that you have on your school system to the kids and have them try out different features in a more guided lesson than you can do in a lab. We use ours a lot for "virtual manipulatives" in math. There's a large network of SmartBoard users online who share lesson plans. AND you can do your lesson on the SmartBoard, and then print the "slides" for kids who are absent, so you can give them the whole lesson on paper.

I'm THRILLED to be getting mine!