Suggestions for use
One of the critical elements of the use of a SMART Board is its functionality for students. At the beginning of the year, teachers need to introduce the tool (that goes for most new classroom tools) and the manner in which it is treated and used (eg. DO NOT WRITE ON IT WITH MARKERS!). We have found that moving icons on the board can be a challenge for students as it takes a conceptual shift to understand that only the first point of contact on the board will be the active one. We have found that when it comes to moving icons, an excellent assistive tool for students is to provide a soft and new tennis ball that serves as the point of contact to the board. It is easy to grasp, slides smoothly and helps to balance students in their physical movements on the board (thank you Serena Fryer). In many ways for those whom are proficient with the pencil grasp, the pens are still a preferred tool when it comes to specific writing or drawing tasks.

The board can serve as an excellent tool for a wide range of uses and lessons. In the morning as students come in to the classroom, it becomes the nexus for selecting from the variety of learning options from which students can choose. Students can walk around the classroom look at the various learning stations that have been set up and then go to the board and drag the representative icon onto their name. It is interesting to watch how meticulous students can be in correctly positioning the icon in their name box. This can be done using the tennis ball or students' fingers. Teachers have found this to be an interface that is very easy to set up and use as it only takes a minute or so to add a new activity by selecting an icon and including it in the appropriate file.

Another set of excellent uses occurs during the morning meeting time. Teachers can use the board to display a calendar with links to activities or celebrations or to count the running number of school days. When it is a special day, videos can be shown on the board as a means of furthering understanding or demonstrating a concept such as an eclipse or hurricane. We also find it useful it for reviewing the previous day's blog and examining any comments that have been posted to that blog by friends, family or others. This medium can serve as an occasional multimedia interface for show and tell if children bring images or video links from home upon which they can expand in their explanations.

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In the ELC we use our Smartboard as a place to present the morning letter on which a description of the day has been written, It typically includes missing letters and words as an element of literacy instruction. The technique that teachers have developed are a best practice blend of social and personal work. Students each have their own small white markerboard and pen, and as the teacher walks through the literacy work, students can practice on their own board. Then students hold up their boards and the work is shared and compared. The image below shows a student anticipating the missing word. The video on the right is an example of the letter writing activity that is facilitated by the use of the morning letter on the smartboard.

Another simple but excellent use of the board is to creatively draw using programs such as Kidpix or other graphical tools.

A further use of the board involves group collaborations. When working to determine what type of community-sharing structures might be in place for using classroom Legos, the SMART Board served well for developing a document draft and then voting on approval of the agreements. It also is an excellent tool for the display of graphing tools. We recommend the use of the library of virtual mathematics tools as an excellent site for these Java-based tools. Using these graphs (or those in the SMART Board Notebook), we are able to ask student opinions on a variety of topics and use a range of icons as a means of registering their input. On the right you can see the graph of our favorite types of breads. These virtual manipulatives are also good for other excellent mathematics work including pattern predictions.

During a study of rats and their behavior, the class worked on designing a fun Maze for our classroom pets to explore. The maze designs proposed by students utilized paper and media, blocks as well as designs proposed on the white board. The two rats were grateful recipients of all the creative designs that had been proposed.

Lesson Ideas
One of the lesson ideas that is popular and that is utilized every year at Thanksgiving develops around the concept of "Stone Soup". At thanksgiving we take vegetables harvested from our students' organic garden, combine them with vegetables that each child would like to contribute and make a stone soup for our community harvest celebration. As part of this process we read and study many different version of the class story and talk about the ingredients that go into the soup. During expressive art time, the atelier is used for many different graphic representations of this soup. In the classroom stone soup is integrated into the writing and artwork that students create. The SMART Board provides a virtual contribution to this work as students create a sequence of community pots, draw their vegetable in the pot, and label their delicious depictions.

Images of Use
We have assembled a collection of images of students and teachers using the white board for a variety of lessons including many of those described above. If you are interested in learning more about the use of a SMART Board in particular and the Notebook application that is designed for teachers to use to develop lesson materials, please view the VIDEO of SMART Board expert user Serena Fryer giving a workshop on the use of the tool to our ELC staff.