When I walk into the library at my school, one of the first things I see is a display of magazines and newspapers for casual or recreational reading.  There is Sports Illustrated, People, and other specialty journals and magazines.  There are several newspapers from our local paper to national newspapers.  I am excited to see students sitting down and reading articles of interest to them.  But there is a limitation.  Only the person who picks up the magazine can read the articles.

Similarly, students are discouraged from cruising and reading these same journals online.  Yet, many students could be viewing articles of interest from the same source if they were encouraged to utilize the internet access to the web sites.  How do we reconcile recreational reading of printed matter with recreational reading of electronic matter?

Some would say libraries are facing obsolescence.  But I would argue that libraries are an excellent place to enage students in the recreational reading that we educators crave for our students.  Well, there is the issue of students abusing the opportunity to visit other sites that might be questionable.  But I would argue, that is an acceptable risk.  We all want to try out “our wheels” whne we get them.  We want to see where we can go - and for a while it is a novelty.  But after a while the novelty wears off and we will focus in more quickly on the task at hand.

I think our job as educators lies in educating students to be comfortable in using the world wide integrated network of resources.  Will they make mistakes?  Sure.  But it is better they make the mistakes under our watchful eye than it is for students to experiement at home or elsewhere out of sight of supervision.

So what do you think about that?

My thanks to all of you who attended the Smart Board session on August 5, 2008 at Herndon High School. I thoroughly enjoyed being the facilitator for the session. I appreciated the positive feedback I received

I have posted the notes from the session. The notes were created with the Smart Board and then “printed” as a PDF file. Click on the Certificate to see the notes. Thanks again for participating.

SMART Technologies offers “hands on practice” exercises at there website.  You can click on the picture of the Smart Board and you will be taken to the site.  Yo will have to scroll down to find the exercises. 

For convenience here are the individual files that you can download.

Smart Board Basic Functionality
Smart - Using the Notebook
Smart - Using Notebook with Microsoft Office
Smart - Using PowerPoint
Smart - Using Excel
Smart - Using Word in the Classroom

SMART Technologies offers several Quick Reference Guides (QRG’s) to assist you when using the SMART Board.  They are available on the Smart Technologies website.  Click on the Smart Board picture and you will be taken to the site.

To save you time, here are links to the PDF files.  To see all of the QRG’s, use the link above.

Smart Board Basics
Smart Board Tools
Smart Board - Orienting
Smart Notebook Toolbars
Smart - Working with Galleries

The PowerPoint below is located on Google DOCs. It was created using the Smart Notebook software. Feel free to utilize the information and links you find in the presentation.