Derek Carlson has spent about four months adapting his old lesson plans into Smart Board lessons, and he couldn’t be more pleased.
Carlson teaches seventh-grade mathematics at Emporia Middle School and, as a summer school teacher, was the first to receive one of the Smart Boards purchased through combined funds of a Jones Foundation grant and the Emporia school district.
“Everything I’ve done in the past four years, I have to do over, but it’s worth it,” Carlson said. “… I thought if I was going to get one of these, I wanted to use it as interactively as possible. I didn’t want to just use it as a marker board.”
The results can be seen daily, as youngsters flock to the Smart Board to work on math topics.
Carlson moved calculators to the cupboard early in the year, when he found too many students relying on technology instead of their own knowledge to do simple problems.
“At the beginning of the year, I had people counting on fingers,” he said. “This year, we’ve used calculators, I think, three times.”
Students learned to rely on themselves for the answers, and the Smart Board captured that technologically inclined generation in a way calculators never could.
“I’ve never seen kids so interested in fractions and decimals,” Carlson said.
The Smart Board hangs on the wall, with speakers, electronic markers and other accessories and an umbilical cord that connects it to Carlson’s laptop computer.
“It’s basically a computer screen,” Carlson said. “Anything you can do with a mouse, you can do on the board. It’s really wild. It’s lots of fun.”
The board has an extensive toolbox of options, with drawing functions, graphics, infinite cloning, math games, suggested lessons, Internet functions and exercises so involved that, depending upon the choices made, students can create more than 30 problems using two algebraic boxes.
Because training on the boards will not be given until more boards are available across the district, Carlson has been exploring the Smart Board’s potential and teaching himself — sometimes by trial and error, sometimes with online tutorials.
“I found out everything I was doing, I was doing it the hard way,” he said, laughing.
He has flash drives for back up and binders already full of lesson plans that have been converted to Smart Board technology. The latter he has meticulously catalogued into precise categories so they are easily in reach when he needs them.
“The more I do it, the faster I am at it, but the more I find out about it,” Carlson said.
Youngsters are so eager to answer questions or solve problems on the board that Carlson said he could not keep track of whom to call on when hands were raised. He eliminated that problem by posting photos of students in each class and instituting a random shuffle, whereby the computer decides who gets to come up and work on the board.
Carlson posts a Before Class Activity — a BCA — on the Smart Board for each class, just as he did before when he was using a standard marker board.
Markers and erasers for the Smart Boards lay in trays at the bottom, like a traditional chalk board. The difference, however, is that each marker is color-coded to its slots. When a student picks up the red marker, the Smart Board recognizes the color and displays it on the board.
Carlson has found that innovations discovered by students in one class can be passed on to another class, if they are having difficulties solving a problem.
“If somebody has a great idea that the other class isn’t thinking of, I can record it,” Carlson said.
He simply draws a box around the student’s solution, groups and sizes it as would be done in Publisher or PowerPoint, and uses his finger to drag it out of the way until, or if, it is needed to be viewed by another class.
The Smart Board comes with a load of vocabulary strategies and lessons that Carlson has discovered as he becomes more familiar with the board; online lesson sources also are available.
“Sometimes there’ll be one page on here that I’ll like,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll like the whole thing.”
Many of the lessons, though, are too primitive to be effective. Instead, he has created his own lesson plans and illustrated them, often in amusing ways. Pop quizzes are easier to swallow, he said, when they’re embellished with something that reflects the students’ reactions — a photo of a baby orangutan whose hair is standing on end, for example.
Carlson saves his lessons and e-mails them to other teachers in the EMS Professional Learning Community, to see if they want to use the plans or have other ideas on ways they could be improved.
Every two or three weeks, the PLCs meet to share their lessons and learnings, offer ideas and ask questions.
“That’s where we come up with a lot of our strategies,” Carlson said. “… I think the board probably allows me to be more efficient than anything.”
Each Smart Board is programmed with access to applications for all subjects. A science teacher, for example, can go to the “Froguts” lesson and bring up a frog to “dissect” on the screen. Social studies students can hear and see Martin Luther King making his “I Have a Dream” speech, Carlson said, bringing up samples of options from other study areas.
The boards are programmed with curriculum geared to the Kansas State Assessments, according to grade levels and subjects.
Carlson said he has been amazed by the way the Smart Board holds the seventh-graders’ attention and makes them eager to participate in class.
Other teachers seem to be having a similar reaction.
“I think everybody that got one is really excited about it. It’ll accommodate any class you need,” Carlson said. “... I think the people that didn’t apply for one were really wishing they had.”