Middle School Science for the Future!

The two YouTube videos below are a part of a debate on the efficacy of interactive boards (read SMART boards) in the classroom. The speakers are policy makers for school districts as well as a representative from SMART technologies. They make many salient points.

My experience in this area would seem to bear these observations out. At my school we got SMART boards in about 4 years ago. At first we had only two for a staff of 20 teachers. I experimented with it but was given no training on how I might use it in my curriculum. I tended to use it at that point to display powerpoint notes presentations. None of the other teachers used the other board in their rooms on a daily basis for a variety of reasons.

Two years ago we had increased our SMART board population to 11. At this point almost any teacher could get a SMART board if they wanted to use one. Still when in the spring of that year I got a new class of students and began to write the procedure for the investigation we were about to conduct together in a Notebook one of my students responded enthusiastically, “Wow! All of my other teachers just use those to show movies!” I was floored.

This year we have had a turnover in staff and a few converts. About 5 of our staff now use SMART boards on a regular basis. They use them for a variety of reasons. Some show educational videos. Many use them for brainstorming ideas with students. They are also used to display lessons and go through them with students.

In my own teaching I use mine for a variety of things

• Giving instructions
• Saving lesson plans I can post online
• Collaborating with students
• Some powerpoints
• Demonstrating web 2.0 techniques
• Showing demonstrations of lab techniques….
• Many others

In the coming year I am experimenting with many more ideas in how I can use a SMART board to teach web 2.0 skills to my new students and to collaborate online with other classrooms.

In conclusion I guess that I would ask these experts how much time they have given teachers to learn to use their interactive whiteboards? Just like with any technology these have a definite learning curve. Whether or not you train teachers you also have to allow them time to learn about the technology you are putting in their hands and to develop their own ideas about how it will work best for them. Teachers are more resilient than we often make them out to be.

I was reading the blog Cosmic Variance and came across this post called Absorbed in which the author apologizes for not posting recently due to her utter absorption in her current work.  Below I am including a quote from the blog which I found illuminating:

This IS what science is like! When you get so caught up and so excited about something, that literally everything else in life gets put on hold. I’m very excited about this paper, and want to do my best job! I have 3 collaborators, 2 on East coast time, and one in Hawaii. Two of us are in charge of the master text file – me and a collaborator on the East Coast. He is a morning person and works on the file from 8 EDT until mid-afternoon. That means around 10 AM PDT he ships the file to me and I start my day, working until about midnight. Comments from the other 2 collaborators are coming in at all hours at a rapid pace. This means that the collaboration is literally working round the clock! We have a system set up, so we don’t get confused and mix up the “master file” for our paper. It hasn’t failed us yet…

She and her colleagues have set up their schedules so that they can write this paper as if they were sitting right next to each other when they are miles away!  this is a very interesting example of not only scientific process (authentic science work that could be shared with students) but of web 2.0 processes!