Module 4: Technology Interaction

The most recent assignment for our class was teaching an interactive lesson on the SMARTBoard. Our lessons had to be in the form of a SMART Notebook file and last no more than five minutes. Not only was this assignment helping us develop our skills with creating a lesson on SMART Notebook 17.0 but it was also helping us practice our lesson planning skills. The lesson that I chose to taught was a 3rd grade reading introduction to finding the author’s tone. In order to teach this topic, I selected a short story and inserted the first paragraph of it into the SMART Notebook file. On the day that my lesson was taught, I read this paragraph aloud to my pretend students and placed emphasis on the vocabulary words/phrases within them. I then assessed the students’ knowledge of the vocabulary definitions with a matching game. Next, I used a fill-in-the-blank game to evaluate their knowledge of what the vocabulary words/phrases meant in the story’s context. In order to assess the students’ ability to determine the author’s tone, I created a final activity that revealed the negative tone of the story and that accepted three statements supporting that tone. Since my lesson went over the time limit of five minutes, however, I could only establish the author’s negative tone with the students. I learned a lot of things about myself and about creating interactive lessons on SMART Notebook. First, I learned that I tend to speak in a quiet and monotone voice unless I am reading a story. My face also looks expressionless when I am talking in front of other people. Finally, I learned that I tend to use the same words every time I give feedback during a certain activity; such as “Nice job” for the first activity and “Exactly” for the second activity. As for creating the lesson on SMART Notebook, I learned that we can only place reading material on the file by taking a picture of the passage and inserting it. Because of this, I could not edit the text itself which would limit interaction with the students during this portion of the lesson. Therefore, I do not think that SMART Notebook is the most effective tool for teaching reading lessons. We can still use the SMARTBoard to teach reading lessons, however, by projecting online programs that have interactive activities for the students. I also think that in order to teach a really effective lesson, teachers should not rely solely on the SMARTBoard.