SMART Board, or SMART Bored?

Despite the title of this blog post, I am definitely a supporter of the use of Smart Boards and technology such as smart boards in the classroom. However, this is more of a response as to the proper use of technology in the classroom as it relates to the ineptitute of teachers.

Last week I stood up infront of the class to give a talk on the basic use of Smart Boards. I thought I'd have 15-20 minutes to present, but was mistaken and instead had only 5. My 5 minute presentation went, in my mind, quite terribly.

From this seeming failure, I have come to wonder about how I will use technology in my classroom. I am worried about not fully keeping up to date with current tech and therefore not being able to effectively use technology as a teaching tool in my classroom.

I believe that my student's perception of me as a teacher and authoritative, knowledgable figure, will rely on my own ability to display and convey my knowledge effectively to the class. Therefore, if I am unable to properly impliment the use of technology in my classroom, I feel that the student's will regard me with less respect - and see me not as an authority on the subject.

In my past, I've experienced the feeling of teaching a subject that I wasn't an expert on and I was caught making mistakes by students. I believe it caused the students to lose some trust in me as their teacher.

I am not completely sure how to deal with this problem, other than becoming an expert on every subject that I attempt to teach.

And therefore, as newer and newer technologies, such as SMART boards become educational mainstays, I feel aprehensive about keeping up with these technologies, knowing that the students themselves may have a greater knowledge than my own.

Forget Real Life... lets have a Comic Life

I suppose I'll start by both thanking and apologizing to Brady for his inclusion in this blog entry.

I'll start this entry with a story - because, if I've learned anything from Gregory Brian, its that stories are always a good way to start off anything.

So, I was talking with my little cousin last week about his classes and his teachers. He said that his favourite class was art, but that his art teacher was terrible. I asked why she was so terrible and he said it was because they were asked to do an art project, and he had decided to do it in the form of a comic book. However, when the teacher saw his work - she said it was a terrible idea and she through it in the garbage and told him to do something else.

I was appalled at this story. I was tempted to go visit the school and give the teacher hell for doing this to my little cousin. But of course I didn't. Instead I told him that she was in the wrong and that his work was great and then we drew a comic together.

I believe that comics are a great way to motivate kids to read. And I don't like to make gender stereotypes, but I believe that comics are a great way for boys to be enthusiastic about reading because of the pictures and the general action/adventure nature of most comics.

Programs such as Comic Life would be an amazing way to encourage young students to create comics of their own. Its easy to use, cheap and fun.

Teaching with TED

In class the other day, we watch an interesting and informative video on www.ted.com about the function and use of an archaic technology called an Astrolabe. Whilst this is a fantastic example of old technology, the lesson we learned was not about the Astrolabe itself, but rather the application of using websites such as TED in the classroom.

Over the past few years, I have been an English language teacher in numerous countries including South Korea, Thailand and China. In my lessons, I often took advantage of the videos provided by TED for various reasons.

One way I used TED was for the obvious reason of teaching my students about a certain subject which was discussed in one of the TEDtalks. For example, I showed my Chinese students a video by Sir Ken Robinson about how schools kill creativity. I displayed the video and asked my students to give a response to the content.

Another way was by showing the students a random video and, because they are English language learners, I had them listen and had them fill out a worksheet based on the script.

I also had my students do a project on a topic chosen by themselves where they had to find a video on TED which they found interesting and then report on it back to class.

Overall, I believe that websites such as TED are great educational tools because they are free to use and incredibly informative. Students' interest is also maintained because they enjoy watching videos rather than listening to a teacher lecture. There are numerous applications of this type of website and are a useful tool for any teacher.