Alyson:

What (if any) pedagogical benefits do you believe the interactive whiteboard offers and why?

I guess Smartboards are pretty handy in most classrooms, because you can write in different colours and get students to come out and play with multimedia things and write with their fingers or whatever.

I don’t think I will be using the Smartboard much as a teacher just because doing a Smartboard lesson means that what you’re doing is pretty much set in stone and there’s not that much room to breathe or to go off on (useful and informative) tangents.

I think an occasional smartboard lesson would be great, as long as it’s not used all the time. I think I would use it more for the junior classes and probably not much for senior classes, unless I thought it was actually the easiest way to present something, such as 3D diagrams.

Smartboards are an effective learning tool though, especially for students who get distracted easily. Visual learners don’t really get much satisfaction from maths normally, and the colour and liveliness of a smartboard would be a welsome change from the monotony of the textbooks.

The thing with Smartboards is, you don’t like them unless you use them a lot, and you don’t use them a lot unless you already like them. I guess gradually over time, if you use them a little bit for each of your classes, you’ll build up an effective way to use them, know when to use them and also build a database of Notebook files that you can adapt and reuse all the time. That is one very good point to using Smartboard – you can keep the lesson plan and just roll with it again.