Simple Ways to Get the Best Out of Smart Boards

The advent of Digital Learning is changing the landscape of educational curricula. With advancements in technology, the advancements in learning are shaping a modern society like never before. Children can now play while learning and enjoy the process. What was once oral repetition is now visually enhanced material that is meant to intrigue and expand consciousness.

So how does it work? The traditional blackboards have now turned into SMART boards that can entertain, explain, measure, analyse and assign tasks to individual children based on their pace and style of learning. These smart boards can be connected to almost any digital device. The teacher can ask questions to an entirely classroom by the push of a button and receive all of their answers in a systematic spreadsheet. Teaching has never been easier.

To get the best out of Smart Board, there are a few simple features a teacher could try to explore along with their students.

1. Brainstorming sessions - When a teacher is getting the students to step up and be creative, it is essential to take note of every individual idea. These ideas and thoughts can be jotted down and stored as notes on the digital learning software that supports the Smart Board.
2. Games - We have never come across a child that doesn’t like games. It can be observed that any lesson or task that is turned into a game immediately makes children active, competitive and curious to know more. The Smart Board promotes just that with several resources that can be easily downloaded.
3. Interactive Websites - Teachers can explain concepts and ideas with fun and interactive websites that do not allow the children to get easily distracted. Intense and elaborate topics can be covered lightly with humor and suitable imagery that allows them to visualize the entire concept.
4. Get Flashy - Teachers can use fancy templates for lessons, images, videos and audio clips that make teaching fun not only for the children but for the teachers as well. Teachers can incorporate their own voices into the lessons and edit the details as per their knowledge of their student’s personalities and preferences.
5. Leave no gaps - With Smart Boards, a teacher can understand which student really understands a concept and which child needs more attention. For instance, if twenty out of thirty students do well on a test and the remaining 10 do not, the teacher can immediately pull out information as to who doesn’t get what! The teacher can then spend individual time with the children who need the extra attention while the others continue their learning. There is no waste of time, no gaps in understanding and most importantly, no child gets left behind.
6. Organize to your heart’s content - Documents like lesson plans can be systematically organized to meet the requirements of a perfect syllabus pattern. The lesson plans can be shared with coworkers as well in a way that is easy to understand. They can also be broken down and simplified for the children to understand the various aspects of a lesson.

Some of the best smart boards in use today are the SMART Board 800, SBM 480iv and SBM 885ix. These are some of the best collaboration solutions for classrooms, provided by C3 IT Xperts to help spark the imagination of students and keep them engaged.

Ultimately, what was once hard work and time consuming is now fun, easy and motivating for both students and teachers - the processes of both learning and teaching. Imagine fractions, being explained orally and then drawn on a blackboard in a way that looked way too serious and complex...almost as if it were rocket science that could never be grasped. This is how we were taught. This is probably why a lot of us still don’t get fractions. But today’s classrooms have music, humor, accurate visual graphics, automatically generated questions and consideration for an individual child’s learning abilities.

There are many ways to attain the benefits of digital learning through the use of Smart Boards, but the best advice to truly experience the results is to fully utilize each feature to its fullest, while tweaking the software to suit the preferences of both the teacher and the children. The bottomline is, creativity is contagious. If the teacher gets creative, it motivates the children to do the same and allows their potential abilities to shine through.