Technology Grant!

As I sat here considering my options about how I felt it would be most affective to spend my class's $3,000 technology grant, numerous ideas popped into my head. Should I start building a class set of laptops? What about the Apple Ipad? What would benefit my students the most and help enhance their overall learning experience? Well,  I made up my mind on how I intend to spend this generous amount of money for our class and I hope you  guys are as excited about it as I am! So here it goes! I am ecstatic to announce that our class will be getting a SMART Board installed, complete with the projector, table stand, speakers, and programs to explore all of it's capabilities! Also, I will be purchasing a class MacBook, which will allow me to utilize all the different SMART Board features and create digital, interactive lesson plans to display on it.


SMART Board w/ Table Stand = $1,199.00
MacBook = $999.00
Audio System for SMART Board = $299.00
Additional Program Software for the Classroom = $500.00
An Interactive, Groundbreaking Learning Experience = PRICELESS!

How can it be used in the classroom? Excellent question! Here are some things it will allow me to do:

 
• Share new lessons and presentations, and add on to the presentation and explain it further by making digital markings with the special pens as we go over it 
• Ability to be used as a traditional whiteboard by making digital marks with the pens on a white screen
• Ability to use interactive websites as a whole class
• Ability to make lesson plans appeal to all different types of learners by showing diagrams, videos, simulations, etc...
• Share examples of good work or trouble areas by scanning in sample assignments and editing/correcting them digitally in front of the class
• Save lessons to reteach students who were absent or need extra help
• Prepare students for tests/exams by playing interactive games and activities on the board
• When teaching math lessons or using dice for games you can make the dice interactive, by clicking the die it will automatically roll (interactive materials like the dice encourage students' motivation to participate and  learn)
• When doing vocabulary or any similar lesson the smart board has a tool called a shade which will allow me to cover some of the page, only displaying what I want at a certain time (shade can be moved from top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right, or right to left.)
• Print everything I have worked on or presented, including notes that were digitally written on the actual board itself

The remarkable SMART Board technology has already been recognized for changing the classroom environment as a whole and has been said to involve, encourage, and excite students of all ages. With our children today being more technologically savvy than ever before, they deserve and ultimately need a technological education to compete in the 21st century, and the use of the SMART Board helps to meet that need. We live in a time where it is not enough to simply give the students the information we want them to learn and hope they can regurgitate it on the test. We live in a better time with much higher expectations, and this SMART Board will help our students achieve more in the classroom and make learning fun! I am so excited to get this new piece of technology up and running in our classroom and am beyond eager to play around with it and discover every capability it has to offer!