What the Heck is a Smartboard and what makes it soooooo Smart???

  This was my first smartaleck question when I found out we had to do a smartboard presentation for my class in technology.  I had heard about a "Smartboard" from my kids talking about it at their elementary school, but I had no clue what the heck one does or how it works!  Time to get smart! Which I feel like I have been saying to myself a lot, i.e. I know nothing about the topic in front of me, I better figure it out fast!

  So the first thing I figure out, which I already kind of knew, is that there is a "Smartboard" company that builds and sells these Smartboards to all kinds of groups, not just schools.  Not only do they sell these boards, but there is a whole website dedicated to the development of Smartboard  ideas to implement in the classroom.  See https://exchange.smarttech.com/account/login?continue=.  This website was super, for not only showing me how to create a Smartboard presentation, but it has a lot of Smartboard presentations that have already been created that you can steal from!  Yay!

  To begin creating my Smartboard presentation, I tried to keep in mind what my professor has said, which is in a nutshell, "is the use of technology just a gimmick or does it in a real way further the learning of student's in a way conventional methods do not?"  My answer to this was not clear until the implementation of my Smartboard presentation, which was "Causes of the Civil War".  In creating this presentation I was under the misapprension that I needed to have the students come to the board to complete everything and do all of the touching of the board.  In the presentation of it however, I as the teacher took over many of the aspects of touching the board, while still having the students do some of it.  I found that this worked much better for the flow of the material, but still was an innovative method by which the students could learn.  I got good responses to this, especially about mixing up who went to the Smartboard.

  I am officially a believer in this technology!  Here are some other good sites to find materials:

http://www.scholastic.com/browse/collection.jsp?id=190
http://teachingwithsmartboard.com/
http://www.actiondonation.org/articles/smart-board-resources.html