John Blaser from Eastchester, NY, presented his rollout and training of staff in his school system. Critical Factors for Integrating SMARTboards into Classrooms, Schools and Districts. His district has 2800 students and has integrated SMARTboards , 125, into their classrooms for the past 2.5 years.There are still more SMARTboards to add to the district. As part of John's presentation he interviewed many teachers(40), administrators(8), and many email anecdotes. He asked 2 questions:
What was necessary or what contributed to the successful integration of SMARTboards into your classroom, school or district?
What are the benefits of integrating SMARTboards into your classroom, school or district?
Critical factors from the interviews:school committee support, support of administrators,training during the school day, must have substitutes, train right in the classrooms PROFESSIONAL development is KEY, will make or break how it is used in the classroom, trained by teachers and technology integration specialists
Implementation: Deployment and Configuration-
Integration Plan, Professional Development Model- teacher training in the building and knowing the people in the building to go to for support. Classes for inservice credit. Informal training in small groups at a grade level. Start with small goals and small implementation plans. Provide options for training, one size does not fit all.
Administrative Support-need to understand the enormity of the SMARTboards
Professional Development-key
Time Interest and Dedication-Allow teachers time during day, course work, afterschool all good options.It will take about a year to get the SMARTboard integrated into the teachers day.
Go to JohnBlaser.com for some of John's resources. 2/27/07 -823
Stephanie Carson, a product developer for SMART presented the newitems that are coming out. The Notebook is the mainstay of the productdevelopment.
Bridgit enables multiple users to connect easily and share real-timevoice, video and data with out making reservations, installing softwareon the desktop or uploading preesntation materials in advance. It alsouses VoIP. Allows the user to hand over the desktop and you canannnotate over the screen.*
SynchronEyes is a classroom management software.
SmartIdeas the concept mapping software. It is complimentary with the board.
The SMARTboard 600 series needs a seperate projector and has theability to move up and down. USB audio, wireless bluetooth, gowire.
The 600i series has an arm that projects 3.5 feet, which is theprojector. Purchase all through SMART. You can also run without acomputer. You can use a USB key to run your program. People can do theinstall on their own.
The Airliner wireless slate allows the teacher to teach from aroundthe room as well as having students participate using the board.
The Senteo Interactive response system.You can use for quizzes on the fly and immediate graphs are ready to use.
Sypodium is a product that allows inteactivity on a huge screen, not an interactive white board.
SMART is committed to education by providing professional development and unlimited support.
Many training opportunities are available at the SMARTTECH site.
SychronEyes- is a classroom management system great for labs, orgroups of laptop classrooms. You can push out files, so you can get theurl page all on the student computers.Windows compatible.
SmartIdeas concept mapping software. It is very intuitive and agreat resource. It is great for visual learners. It has great levelsand links well with Notebook. There are lesson plans already made onthe website.
2 comments:
Cheryl,
I couldn't really find the answers to this question in your notes: What are the benefits of integrating SMARTboards into your classroom, school or district? I think it's the most important question to be asking about this technology.
Hello Graham,
I took notes during the presentation, so right now you are looking at notes, not a summary or reflection of the days. Since we are in the middle of a blizzard I will blog about my reflections. John Blaser had a video presentation where he interviewed administrators, teachers and students with those 2 questions. The answers were incredible. The most impressive point that I came away with from over 15 interviews that he showed: (*****the majority of the teachers and administrators have experience ranging from 20-30 years in education) students in classes with SMARTboards are more engaged with the content, teachers using SMARTboards, even veteran teachers, are more motivated to create and organize content in this presentation format, content is easily presented for your visual learners, for your audio learners, the tactile kinesthetic learners. HOWEVER, this is using the SMARTboards in different ways,not using the SMARTboard to replace the teacher at the front of the room, but rather using the SMARTboard and the content in an interactive way. I hope some of my fellow conference participants will comment on this too. Thanks again for your comment Graham.
Over and out. Cheryl
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